Learn how to effectively scout teams in preparation for your next competition

1. Scouting out the
competition
Useful tools for understanding your opponents at FIRST competitions
before competing

2. Presentation
purpose: Learn how
to effectively scout
teams in preparation
for your next
competition

3. First, think about your competition’s:
● Location
● Time
Depending on the location or time of the competition, robots may be
more or less competitive. If your competition is early in the season, there
will likely be less competition, but if later, likely more! Additionally,
depending on the location, there may be a higher concentration of highly
competitive teams.
Identify your competition

4. Identify your opponents
● Often, events will release their team lists before the competition starts
● Download a list of these teams, this will be important!
● Understand the size of your competition as well
If there are more teams signed up for the competition, this may mean that
it’s harder to be part of a playoff alliance, thus harder to advance.
Additionally, this may change the award pool – start considering which
award you want to aim for!

5. Analyze Base Team Data
● Look at each team’s location
○ Are they from a different region/country?
○ How competitive is their region?
● Look at each team’s size (via social media)
○ Do they have a big team?
○ Do they have a lot of mentors?
With all of these, you can start to get a lot of beginning conceptions of a
team.

6. Now, look a bit further at team data: we want to check their past events.
● Have they played at an event this season?
○ If so, what were their stats? (you can use stats like ftcscout.org for
FTC or statbotics.io for FRC)
○ Look at their OPR (or EPA)! Additionally, look at their regional
ranking! It’s important to have context to your region.
● If not, how have they done in the past?
○ Look at previous year rankings. How well did they do?
Analyze Other Teams

7. Create a Spreadsheet!
● Create a spreadsheet using all of the available data
● Start analyzing each team’s data!
○ Create an average of each team
● Compare your team’s stats
○ If you have competed, use your previous event’s stats
○ If not, try and formulate some stats based on your current bot
performance, or from previous year data!

8. Identify your biggest challenge
● What are some competitive teams that you may foresee doing well?
● What is the most common strategy?
● Does your robot have something unique?
● Does some team have a dominating strategy?
○ Take notes, if you have a future event, you may want to use it!

9. Get Ready!
This event will be fun, so get ready!

10. Good luck!