What does a sports scout do?

What is a Sports Scout?

A sports scout is a member of the professional and university-level sporting community that helps teams and organizations find the best athletes in the world. A typical scout will use his or her time to travel all across the globe in order to find and assess players that fit the needs of the organizations they represent. A scout for the sporting community is an excellent judge of talent and is able to determine if an individual is worthy of either immediate access to a playing field, or of training and growing their talents in practice camps.

What does a Sports Scout do?

A sports scout will spend most of their time searching for new talent, watching and documenting either young or already established players in their respective fields, and attempting to sign up players for the organization(s) they represent. While computer software is increasingly helpful in keeping track of a player's statistics, it is still the job of human scouts to assess the skills of players and make judgment calls as to whether or not they are a perfect fit for the team they work for.

Sports scouts travel on a constant basis to cities and towns, both big and small, and spend numerous hours reviewing footage, statistics and interviewing coaches and teammates. A scout for the sporting industry must not only be an excellent judge of talent in their respective sporting field, but must also be a skilled salesman that can sign up the best talent before other scouts do.

Additionally, a sports scout must not only be able to look at established players who are already playing on a professional level, but also make judgment calls about young and semi-pro athletes. Sports scouts need to be able to easily determine if younger, less-experienced athletes have the skill sets necessary to eventually become a top-notch player. This means that sports scouts need to be not only good judges of current skill, but judges of potential skill as well.

What is the workplace of a Sports Scout like?

The "office" of a sports scout is the open road. Scouts are tasked with traveling both in and out of their own countries to acquire the best skilled people on earth. A scout can expect to spend hundreds if not thousands of hours on the road and in the air in order to make their represented team the best it can be. Once sports scouts get to their destination they may have to spend days or even weeks pouring through information, observing individuals practice and play, and talk to coaches and teammates about their skill potential.

When scouts aren't in the field they are in their offices going through data, newspapers and following leads all over the world. Most of a sports scout's work takes place during the current season of play for the scout's respective field, but even in the off-season scouts are expected to research and keep up with players that could be the next big thing.