Qualitiative Scouting

[Skyehawk]

Originally Posted by Boltman

As the scouting/strategy mentor we have solid success with qualitative scouting past two seasons, we started the scouting department two years ago (about 8-10 students) . I highly recommend this approach to any team thinking of scouting the matches, it works. The whole drive team the scouting info helps them greatly in gameplay and per game custom tactic discussions with partner teams. We use the numbers too but only as verification of what our actual eyes saw. Also to re-evaluate those on the numbers sheet that missed our radar. The students come up with the "game by game" strategy and talk to the drive team then the drive team uses that info to partner with other teams. I try to scout all the games and then on Friday night we compare notes. Get pick list ready. We try to do enough day 1 to be in top 12 that gets on every scouts radar Friday night higher if we can. Lower and we did not do our jobs/roles well somewhere along the line. Durability was a huge issue last year... engineering design issue made it hard. A good learning experience to try to overcome.

Our tools: Notebook, pen , eyes and highlighter plus some Internet stat verifications.
Knowing the desired attributes going in helps a lot. Then finding those and assembling that list.

This season especially qualitative seems like a good way to go due to the Fuel deal.

This, this is what I am trying to embody, very well put. The only difference is we are trying to use electronic DAQ to pick up a few quantitative data points for use mostly in verification and some strategy (such as cycle time optimization for the alliance). The electronic method also helps with report generation, data tabulation is annoying to do by hand.