A head coach opens your scout in a corridor, standing up, ninety seconds before they have to say something to a room. That is the real reading environment. Not a desk, not the night before, not with a highlighter. Ninety seconds, standing up, already thinking about something else.
Everything I have learned about writing scouts comes from taking that seriously.
What they are actually looking for
Three things, in this order, and they will not read past the point where they find them.
What are we doing. Not what the opponent does. What we are doing about it. A coach cannot say "they run a lot of ball screen" to a team. They can say "we are icing every side ball screen and living with the pull-up."
Who is the problem. One name, occasionally two. Every squad has a player whose night decides the game, and the coach wants that name before they want anything else.
What is the one thing that beats us. The thing that, if it happens, means we lose. Coaches are not looking for a balanced assessment. They are looking for the trap.
If your first page answers those three, the rest of the document is reference material and it can be as detailed as you like. If it does not, the detail is wasted, because nobody reached it.
The structural mistake almost every scout makes
It opens with context. Record, recent form, personnel summary, style overview. All of it accurate, all of it useful somewhere, none of it a plan. By the time the document gets to what we should do, the ninety seconds are gone and the coach is skimming for bold text.
The fix is not to delete the context. It is to move it. Verdict first, evidence after. Same information, opposite order, completely different document.
I write the top of a scout as though it is the only thing anyone will read, because for the head coach it usually is. The assistants read page four. The head coach reads the top and asks me a question. Both of those are correct behaviours and the document has to serve them separately.
What earns space at the top
A headline with the mechanism in it. "Wall the two bigs, live with the guards" is a plan. "Defensive Analysis" is a filing label. If the headline could sit above any team's scout, it is not doing anything.
Two or three keys, ranked, with the reason the first one is first. Not five. Five is a list nobody remembers. The ranking is the work: anyone can produce a list of true observations, and choosing which one matters most is the part a coach is paying for.
The name. With what they do and what we are doing about it, in one line.
The thing that beats us. Stated as the thing, not softened into a consideration.
What does not earn space at the top
Anything they already know. If the coach has played this team twice, the personnel summary is noise. Anything with a low confidence attached. And anything I would have to hedge into meaninglessness, because a hedged line at the top of a scout costs more than it gives: it teaches the reader that the top of the page might not be reliable, and after that they read all of it slowly or none of it at all.
Uncertainty goes in the body, labelled honestly, with the sample size and what would resolve it. Never in the first ninety seconds.
The test
Hand it to somebody who was not in the room when you wrote it. Give them ninety seconds. Take it back and ask them what we are doing.
If they can answer, ship it. If they give you an accurate summary of the opponent instead of a plan, you have written a report rather than a scout, and the difference is the entire job.