Whether your sports organization has a group of full-time employees, a crew of volunteer coaches, or you are running evaluations on your own, everyone is looking to find extra time. The removal of data entry is one of the main features that make athlete evaluation app so attractive to groups because it can save so much time. 

Data entry typically occurs at the end of an evaluation, camp, or tryout when coaches need to input all collected data in a short period of time. An athlete evaluation app works to reduce this by creating a user-friendly process to avoid this step. Here is how it is done: 

Scoring Athletes

It is common for sports clubs and organizations to have Excel or PDF printouts of all the metrics that they wish to evaluate athletes on for an event. Traditionally, these are handed over to the evaluators running the evaluation, where hand-scribbled notes are taken. While using a software solution, evaluators can score athletes right from their mobile phones or tablets instead of printing out hundreds of paper forms.

Data Collection

Once data is collected (i.e., the scores, videos, and notes made by evaluators) they are instantly made available to the administrators of the group. The administrator has the option to view an evaluator scores table, which shows them who has submitted data and who they are still waiting on. Once all data is there, coaches can begin viewing the results.

Reporting

Coaches can easily see the data that was collected by all of their evaluators. With SkillShark, they can view this data in a few different report formats:

• Individual Reports: This separates data for each player to be viewed individually. Players are able to see how they score on a specific skill, how they fare to the team average, and view any comments made by the evaluators. These reports can be exported to a PDF format and emailed to each player individually.
  
• Weighted Reports: This is best used when selecting players for a specific position. For instance, identify the metrics that are most important to you when choosing a shooting guard and assign a weight to them in your evaluation template (e.g., pull ups, layups, and free throws). Using the weighted report, you will be able to see which players are most suited for your team’s shooting guard position.
  
• All Scores Reports: This report will showcase all collected scores in a grid-like format. Coaches can dive into a specific category (i.e., “physical” category in softball) or a specific skill (i.e., accuracy and mechanics skills in softball) to look at athlete scores.

All Scores report in SkillShark

Wrapping Up

Athlete evaluation softwares like SkillShark will save you time by reducing data entry for your sports organization or club. Spend less time writing down athlete scores on pen-and-paper and more time diving into player insights from auto-generated reports.

The decision to use SkillShark with our national program has saved our coaches and evaluators weeks of data entry. SkillShark substantially contributes to the growth of each USSSA player with the collection of their metrics and performance data.

Courtney Ceo. USSA National Program Director