For a recreation level program, your Skills Assessment Day or Player Evaluations is the single most important day of your entire league. Everyone is excited to be out there, the kids and coaches are ready to start so it is important you nail it. Running a well organized assessment of your players will give a great first impression, ensure you have fair and balanced teams, and kick off your season on a great note. Put a lot of time and effort into planning your assessment day so it is flawless. Here are some guidelines to run a top notch skills assessment and then use them to fairly form your teams.
- Determine the Structure: You can either have all the kids in a division come at once or stagger them to come in waves, depending on how much staff you have to run it. Another way to do it is have the coaches there for the duration but have the kids come anytime in the time window, do the drills, and leave. This will be quicker, but you don’t get the benefit of addressing the group as a whole. Make all kids come every season as a mandate to participate so they can be reassessed and ensure they are placed where they need to be, even if they play every season.
- Check In and Parents Packets: Have a check in process to sign kids in, get their player number and scorecard, and hand out any informational packets you have for the parents. Once the kids check in have them get to their starting stations or line them up nice and organized somewhere. Send the parents to their seating area. It is not a great idea to get the balls out and having the kids all over the place until you are ready to start.
- Coaches Kids: Although coaches kids will be automatically placed on their parent’s team, make sure they attend the evaluations and you get a score on them so they are placed properly. Coaches will always undervalue their own kids because they want to get better kids on the team. A lot of the time, the coach’s kids are the better players. If you cannot get any skills assessed from a coach’s kid, always place them higher to avoid their team ending up stacked. This can also be somewhat of a penalty that if they refuse to bring their child they have to pick them in a higher round, regardless of skill level.
- Address the Parents: Unless you do a parent orientation, this is your only time to address all the parents at once as a group. Take advantage of this by introducing yourself and going over some of the more important things for the upcoming season. You may feel like you send this out at registration and in reminders, but you never know what they actually read. Anytime you can address the parents in person, do it.
- Stations: Arrange your drills in stations, usually 4-6 depending on the amount of kids you have and your time constraints. Have your staff or volunteers score kids at each station based on the result of the drill. It is not a great idea to do scrimmages at an assessment as you won’t get much out of it. The kids that dominate the scrimmage will already be on your radar as an excellent player. Everyone else gets lost in the shuffle so it is usually not effective. Keep the drills simple and increase difficulty as they get older. Remember, many kids may have never played before or even touched a ball yet.
- Scoring: Score your players objectively on the actual results of the drills, rather than the subjectivity of what a coach or parent thinks their skill is by assigning them a number. Having the kid’s display a few skills as a group in front of the coaches and having your coaches give them an arbitrary ranking just does not cut it. You can however, allow your coaches to give feedback in a coaches ranking discussed below. Check in each participant with a number and a scoresheet. As they go to each drill have the volunteer write in their score. Collect these at the end and you have a ton of data to place a child properly on the skills they can perform. Examples of drills (will vary by sport):
- Sprint (with and without the ball)
- Shooting
- Passing
- Throwing
- Catching
- Dribbling
- Hitting
- Agility (weave through cones)
- Coaches Ranking: Score the kids based on the drills but use your coaches ranking as a part of their final score. Keep it simple with a 1-3 or 1-5 rank of each child. This will still allow your coaches to give their input, but it will only reflect a small portion of the total. This is also your failsafe if a child over performed or underperformed. For example, if all your coaches gave a child a high ranking as an excellent player and the drills placed them low, you can make the adjustment to ensure the child is properly placed. This is also a failsafe for “sandbagging” or coaches/parents telling their kids to underperform on purpose to try and get on a specific team (sad but it happens!).
- Look Out For Sandbagging: Sandbagging is when the kids or group of kids purposely try not to do their best so they can potentially land on a team with better players. This will happen in the older age groups, and it’s unfortunate if it encouraged by their parents or coaches. Realize this can happen, talk to the group prior to starting to try their best, and shut it down if you see it.
- No Shows: For anyone who does not show, use their scores from last season and adjust them for this season. If you don’t have anything in the past, use those questions you asked at registration such as age, height, weight, and years played to make your best assessment on where they should be placed. Assign them a score accordingly.
- Compile Results: Once you get all the players scores for each drill compile them in a spreadsheet. For timed drills you will have to rank them as you cannot total a time into their final scores since the best scores are the lowest. Add your coaches ranking to come up with a final score for each child. Sort and review the sheet for discrepancies, such as a participant with a high coaches rank but low totals and adjust as needed to place the child appropriately.
No matter how you conduct your skills assessment day or player evaluations, it is never going to be a perfect system. There are so many other factors that cannot be assessed that will have a difference in a team’s success such as leadership, coaching, player chemistry, and their skill development during the season as some may start as beginners but end up as better players. You also have to account for no-shows and their attendance during the season. The team’s performance doesn’t matter, they will find ways to separate themselves on the field. What matters is the process is fair, each team has a variety of skill levels, and you made every effort to make balanced teams.
Team Formation
The number one goal when forming teams in any recreation youth sports league is to make sure your process is fair and the teams are balanced. Not evaluating players, randomly assigning them to teams, or allowing coaches to just pick all the kids they know is ineffective, unfair, and will result in lopsided teams and complaints. Even distributing players solely based on age will not work because you always have some younger kids that are more skilled than some older kids. Making every effort to have fair and balanced teams based on skill will make games more competitive, be more fun for your teams, and alone make your program better. Here are some tips and recommendations to form your teams once you have compiled your skills assessment results.
- Assessment Sheet: Make sure to add the additional information to your results from those questions you asked at registration such as age, height, weight, and years played to the assessment results to have your completed assessment sheet that you will use to form the teams. This is every player in the league sorted by their evaluation score, which would show your most skilled players all the way down to your beginners. Coaches can now also consider the child’s age, size, and experience level when choosing their players.
- Use Tiers to Draft Players: Depending on the amount of kids you have in an age group, you will notice that many of the kids have the same score. It is recommended to put each grouping of kids in tiers when you are ready to form the teams. For instance, if each team has 10 players, you can split up the tiers so each team gets 2-3 kids per tier. This guarantees that the skill level is dispersed throughout each team and coaches aren’t jumping around just picking kids they know.
- Drafting Teams: Use a snake draft format to draft your teams. The league form the teams from the youngest age groups (under 8), rather than drafting, since it should be far less competitive. When you do draft, force coaches to draft from those tiers to ensure skill level is dispersed. You can allow some flexibility if they want to leave a tier to pick someone lower so they have choices for their last picks in a group. Do not auto place any kids on any teams other than coaches kids!
- Assessment Rosters: Once your teams are formed you will have rosters for each team with all their different skill levels. If you total or average the scores for each team they will be very close. This shows on paper that your teams are fair and balanced and the league put every effort into doing so. If a team doesn’t perform to expectation and you get a complaint you can use this as back up. It doesn’t matter how the teams perform, what matters is the process was fair and they all have a variety of skill levels.
- Drafting Players to Pre-Formed Teams: If you are distributing new players to already pre-formed teams make sure the best players end up on the teams with the worst record the season prior. Regardless of how you do it, always try to keep the playing field level. The ultimate goal is to ensure teams are getting stacked and dominating your league each season.
- Never Take Special Requests: You have a system in place for a reason. Allowing parents and coaches to get friends on the same team, letting players play for specific coaches, or getting every parent their ideal practice times ruins the process and will end up with lopsided unfair teams. There may be extenuating circumstances that require you to take a request, but limit this and make sure it is agreed upon by your coaches before moving forward with it.
- Be Transparent: Even when you put this much time and effort to forming your teams, you will always have parents or coaches tell you “It’s not fair” or “that team has all the best players” when they lose more games than they win. To curb this, be vocal and transparent on your process so when those comments do come up, you have the back up to defend it. The system will never be perfect and there are so many more factors outside of just skill that could impact a team, as outlined next.
- Other Factors: This system or any other system you use will not be perfect. There are so many other factors that cannot be assessed that will have a difference in a team’s success such as leadership, coaching, player chemistry, and their skill development during the season as some may start as beginners but end up as better players. You also have to account for no-shows, injuries, and their attendance during the season which cannot be predicted.
When the season gets going team’s performance doesn’t matter, they will find ways to separate themselves on the field regardless of what system you use. What matters is the process is fair, transparent, each team has a variety of skill levels, and you made every effort to make balanced teams. You will also have the documentation to show this in case teams underperform and someone complains about losing. Win or lose, once your participants see the closer game results they will realize that although they may not have gotten preferential treatment in choosing which team they wanted, it is for the better and the overall league will be much more successful when it comes to game play.
Placing Pre-Formed Teams
More competitive leagues that have pre-formed teams playing against each other should still group teams in separate divisions by skill level within their respective age groups when possible, such as an A, B, and C division (A being your top tier teams). Teams that win lower level divisions should be advanced up when deemed necessary. This type of system will make more competitive game play and attract more teams with varying levels of skill. A team just formed and starting out doesn’t want to play all the best teams in the state and get mercy ruled every week. They would rather play similar teams and work their way up to the higher levels. If you do not have enough teams in each age group to do this, another good idea is to play out the season but split into two playoff brackets so your lower level teams still have something to play for at the end of the season in the consolation playoffs.
Never place your pre-formed teams against recreation level league formed teams that you put together, unless it is a scenario where you take “Free Agents.” Free Agents are those that register as individuals in a league that is meant for pre-formed teams in hopes you have enough of them to make a team or add them to teams needing extra players. Placing Rec teams vs Competitive pre-formed teams is always a recipe for disaster that will come with complaint after complaint from rec parents that are losing games big every week. If your leagues are falling short in participation find creative ways to make it work like playing small sided games, but never just combine the two.
A well organized Skills Assessment and a fair and transparent method of forming your teams will give your parents a great first impression of your program and give you the best opportunity to make fair and balanced teams. This will pay dividends throughout your entire season with better and more competitive gameplay as well as with parents and coaches who will see you have a fair process when creating your teams, even if their team is not winning. This alone, above anything else, will garner the most word of mouth and the most growth within your program.
