My Team Needs Help Scouting

[Jeff Rodriguez]

Originally Posted by Joe Matt

There are a few tips and tricks to scouting I've found out, but I'll ask one of my friends who is better with this stuff to post too (where are you Jeff?)

Sorry, I had class.

Here are the things I've learned that I believe are the most important:
1) If someone doesn't want to scout, do make them. You will most likely get rushed, incomplete, inaccurate data.
2) Scouts should be knowledgeable. Don't send the freshmen who spent the whole season on the Vex team. If the scout doesn't know what they're talking about, you won't get good information. Crap in - crap out.
3) Only get relevant data. The last thing you want to be doing Friday night is spending 5 hours just making sense of all the crap you've written down.


Our scouting at championships was pretty successful this year, I'll explain it. During matches we had a few people watching and keeping track of who was scoring, who was lifting bots and who was climbing bots. All of this was entered into an excel sheet. Basically, every time points were scored, we wrote it down. You can see how it all worked here.
The second part was pit scouting. We had a pit sheet that only had information about ramps and ground clearance. We decided that it was most important to know what ramps we could get up and what ramps other teams could get up.
That's all we kept track of. Match strategy was formed based on who could ramp and how many ringers you could score. Our selection list was also based off these numbers.
We had 2 or 3 team members, an adult mentor doing data entry, and the drive team doing everything. It was a lot of work for those people, but generally I think it worked well.

There's also a lot of information about about keeping people motivated and valued, but that's a thread in itself. Read Coach John Wooden's book.

[Orfrith]

Thank you to all of the teams that gave your suggestions they were very useful.

[Mike Schreiber]

One of the cool things we do is use laptops for our scouts, and then use thumbdrives (we're working on bluetooth) to transfer everything into a datebase that we can just querry. I am by no means a specialist in this but it seems to work pretty well from what I've seen, as long as your scouts stay focused. It seemed accurate at nationals...233 was the top scorer based on the database and 254 right behind them...But that may be too much of a hassle. Also you could use a database and just enter your forms into it, once again this requires a lot of preparation, but I think it's worth it. Good luck.

[Cooley744]

This year we were really fortunate to have a mentor who taught us that organization is key to scouting. We made an organized graph for pit surveys with key information points. We then had another graph we filled out while watching the robots in matches. These were good because we could put our opinions on them. Lastly, if many people do the surveys it works better. Give one person 5 or 6 robots to really get to know. All the information we collected, whether survey material, or flyers handed out by the teams, we put in a box which had a folder for each team. That way we had fast and easy access to every team. -hope that helps.