Tryouts – Past Posts
As many teams begin prepping for tryouts, I wanted to share some of the content we’ve posted in the past regarding the topic. Tryouts are certainly a tense time – hopefully some of the tips and topics I’ve written about in the past will be helpful for you moving forward! Best of luck!
Past Posts on Tryouts: http://www.hockeyshare.com/blog/?s=tryouts
Kevin,
You make some excellent points about tryouts. One other thing to consider is the significant effort that can be required to collect tryout data and put it in a form that can be used to make fair, well-informed placement decisions. Many coaches either skip this step or do a poor job of it due to the lack of adequate tools. Having been the owner of the tryout data for the last 5 years, I created a website that allows you to create and categorize any number of skills you would like to evaluate, define a scoring range (per skill if need be), enter your tryout plan in the form of an agenda, make jersey assignments (if you are conducting blind tryouts), print out blank scoring sheets (based on your agenda) to collect data during tryouts, enter data by evaluator for the same set of skills (when using multiple evaluators per task) or different skills (when using one evaluator per task), capture coaches evaluations of the players from the prior season’s teams, and generate a report at the push of a button that combines the tryout data and coaches evaluations into a report that can be used to make the placement decisions. The report smoothes out any issues associated with an evaluator inadvertently missing a data point or a player missing one of multiple tryout sessions.
If any of this sound like it would be helpful, then check out the website at
http://www.helpsetgoals.com
where you will also find a link to my blog where I talk about some of these additional tryout issues. A direct link to that blog post is
http://anros.net/?p=65
Good luck!
Ed