Qualitative Scouting?

[wjordan]

2363 have done qualitative scouting since 2014, and it has resulted in a massive improvement in our ability to judge the quality of the rest of the teams at the competition. We had done the standard quantitative stuff for awhile, but the numbers gathered by quantitative methods are pretty much useless if presented without context, and qualitative scouting helps to confirm trends that are presented by the statistics.

Our system in 2014-15 involved 6 quantitative scouts on Kindle Fires, a coordinator who would manage the scouts and occasionally gather the tablets up to load them into a database, and 1-2 qualitative scouts (the strategy coordinator and someone else, usually) who would take notes on the teams currently playing in the match on index cards.