Make Scouting Fun?

[logank013]

We have a couple of things we've adjusted to make scouting "more fun". First of all, we look for ways to make scouting less tedious. In weeks 1, 3, and 4, we had a section on our scouting data collection sheet that was really tedious. It was data we very rarely used so we condensed that 9 cell section into 1 cell for our week 7 event. Makes things a lot easier to watch and collect data without being annoyingly tedious.

Second thing, one of our mentors always has these boxes of cheez-its and starbursts. Every once in a while, he comes around with the boxes and feeds the team. (Last thing we need is more calories while being lazy in the stands. Haha)

Last of all, this sort of falls under the tedious category as well but we changed our equipment for a good price. Last year, we used these PDAs that were just really tiny and awful for a Scouter to collect data on. I decided this year when I took over scouting that we needed to change it. Our school this year gave every student a chromebook. We decided we would use those instead of PDAs. Now we did run into a major issue at our week 1 competition because of my lack of testing on the equipment. We had to do fully paper scouting for week 1 and that was bad but still better than the PDAs. The only money we spent was buying 7 flash drives and now the system works fairly well.