Scouting as an Aliiance Captain

[Jon Stratis]

Our scouting is the same regardless of our rank - after all, you won't really know until near the end of Quals if you have a shot at being an alliance captain. And honestly, you want to be taking hard data about every match. Going around asking teams how many shots they make each match isn't nearly as accurate or useful as being able to look at actual shot totals from every match they were in. You want to know how consistent they've been over the course of the competition, and keep an eye out for teams that made significant improvements near the end that clearly affected their on-field performance.

Pit scouting has it's place, but that should be as an addition to your on-field performance data. You don't pit scout to find out how good a team is, you do it to find out what happened to make their performance radically change from one match to the next. Did they tank their 5th match because something broke? If so, what was it, and how likely is it to break during the finals? Did they go from scoring nothing the first 3 matches to being one of the top scorers? If so, why did that happen? What prevented them from scoring in the first 3 matches? Those are the types of questions that can be valuable to ask during pit scouting. Instead, you mostly hear the same questions over and over again from teams - Can you shoot high? How many shots per match? Can you climb? Which defenses can you go over? How many wheels does your robot have? (Seriously, I've heard this last one every single year. Why does it matter?!?!?!?)

It's also important to keep in mind that some teams end up alliance captains without preparing for it. If you're their first pick, you want your data available to help them make a good second pick!