What I’ve noticed is that a lot of teams including my own team have had difficulties with getting together a scouting team, and even when they do get together a scouting team, a scouting team is very resourse intensive, it takes many people, many pieces of technology, and it’s often people’s least favorite experience at regionals. Since teams generally gather pretty much the same data, it seems like it would be better for everyone if instead of an individual scouting team per team, if each team volunteered members toward a regional interteam scouting coalition. So I’m wondering if anyone has ever attempted to organize such a feat.
This is actually quite common. Team 20 had a scouting collaboration program with other teams named “Constellation” that involved working with other teams at regionals since 2013. This year Team 5811 is fortunate to be attending the same regionals as Team 3138, who is gracious enough to offer other teams the opportunity to work with them on their scouting program “FIRES”.This requires a lot of forethought and planning by the team organizing it, but can be and extremely effective way of scouting if done right. There will be less pressure on 1 set of kids to sit in stands all day, and with proper training results in much more reliable data.
I will caution however: I have seen it occur that a team used a scouting program with others in season, then attempted to use the same program at an offseason event without a few key members who were critical to scouting during the season. If you are going to offer scouting data to other teams in exchange for their assistance with data collection, you MUST be confident you will deliver on that promise of data.
Our team did partner scouting last year and are going to do it this year as well. It’s very effective as long as both teams are on the same page about how many scouts are provided by each team at each time.
Attempts have been made at this at the Wisconsin regional several years back, with teams ‘signing up’ before the regional. Don’t have direct experience with it though.
The past few years 868 and us have collaborated on scouting together via a computer based system.
We were very lucky to have 1023, Bedford Express, to invite us to scout with them at IRI last year. Both of our teams are very large, but with less than half of each team going, we decided to work together. It definitely lightened the workload of all scouters.