Thanks much for the compliment. The students have worked very hard on the evolution of this system since we started it in the 2013 season. It was critical to our success in 2013 and 2014–it wasn’t quite as important for this year’s game because we were scouting for different types of attributes.

To answer your questions:

We had a larger group of students, but for Central Valley and Champs our travel squad was limited to 20, which left us with a pool of 10 scouts. 8 rotated through the regular scouting and 2 focused on super scouting. Mentors, or one of the programmers would step in for short relief at times. At Sacramento which is in Davis, we had a larger pool, and I think we had a couple more at Silicon Valley.

We trained this year watching most of the Dallas Regional for a day. We live streamed another regional last year, so the training session is about 4 hours. We have shorter follow up sessions with particular scouts. We had a system to check the accuracy of the inputs for each scouting tablet, and we record who used the tablet, so we can ensure that everyone is using the same standards for inputs.

Along with the 20 students on the travel team, we had about 8 mentors and half a dozen parents. We officially had about 50 students on the team, but fewer regular participants by the end of the year. Everyone attends the Sacramento/Davis regional (they can bike to UCD), and many go to Silicon Valley for the day (it’s a 2 hour drive).

We’re starting planning for the coming year, so contact us soon. We’d love to get teams up on the system–it’s a great programming opportunity.