Our drive team and student leadership made it clear at the beginning of the season that scouting was going to be a big part of our success. We had gotten burned by the serpentine last year and we were determined not to let that happen again. So even before the season started, our team made scouting a priority for the season.
Unfortunately, we are a small team. Last year, we ended the season with 9 members and this year we started off around 20. Dedicating the resources to scouting has always been challenging for us.
A couple of our computer savvy students came up with a plan to create a scouting app. The scouting app itself was good, but the clever aspect of their plan was that they decided to crowd source the actual scouting. They reached out to other teams in the area with an offer to share the data with any team that helped us scout. It was a great success. We scouted with other teams at each of our events. We deployed our app to their phones giving us a lot more scouts in the stands. The app pushed the data to a server that compiled it into a database. We shared the raw data with all the teams that contributed scouts to the effort. We had our own analysis of the data that we did not share, but that was part of the crowd sourcing arrangement that we had with the other teams.
We had the best scouting data we have had in recent memory. We were able to leverage that scouting data into 4 blue banners this year. After each of the events, we held a team meeting to re-cap what went well at the event. All the students and mentors talked about how important the scouting was to our success. I believe that this feedback is important as it is easy to lose sight of how important that role is to the success of the team.
Probably the crowning achievement for our scouting team was at Houston. We finished 10th in our division and had the potential to become an alliance captain. Our scouting team had identified a list of potential first and second pick robots. We reviewed them in detail Friday night and came up with our priority list in case we became an alliance captain. We ended up as the 8th seed alliance captain and we executed to the plan that our data said would give us the strongest alliance. That included selecting the 45th ranked robot as our 1st pick, the 55th ranked robot as our second pick and the 61st ranked robot as our 3rd pick. We ended up winning our division and advancing to Einstein. We could not have done that without our scouting program.
It is important to make sure that the scouting team knows that they are just as important to the success of the team as any other position on the team. It is good when the mentors make this clear to the scouting team. It is even better when the rest of the team makes it clear. Scouting has become a central pillar of success for our team and I am confident that upcoming seasons will continue to build on the success we have had this year and being part of the scouting team will be considered a position of highest importance for our team.