Poor team scouting methods?

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by SteveGPage

I tell our students that we will lose one, that we should have won, because something unforeseen will happen, but we will win one that we should have lost because of good scouting. That is our scouting mantra!

Same here! Thanks for providing a great explanation of the different aspects of scouting. We take pictures and put them on a laptop in the pits, we have the scouts make notes about which teams seem to be working well together on the field, and we do pit scouting (mostly to get to know the other teams). It all works together, but the performance data from match scouting seems to be most important.

We are developing the Nintendo DS scouting system because we were so impressed with the effectiveness and ease of use of 842's automated scouting system...and we realized that almost all our team members have a DS, so the hardware is mostly paid for....and our main programmer Kevin likes challenges. The real bottleneck with paper scouting is putting the data into a spreadsheet so you can use it easily. An automated scouting system (using whatever you have available or can buy) makes this a painless process, and also allows you to quickly integrate the data from Saturday morning.