5 Benefits of Athlete Self-Assessments

More than ever, coaches have learned the reality of confidence issues that plague many young athletes today. Getting past the mental roadblocks can often be more challenging than improving the technical aspects. However, athlete self-assessments will enable your players to reflect deeply on their game, set goals, and work toward them.

By conducting self-assessments in SkillShark, you can answer key questions, such as “Is their perception holding them back or pushing them forward?” 

What Are the Benefits of Self-Assessments in Sports?

1. Self-Reflection

Athletes often compare themselves to others, which can be quite damaging to their overall self-confidence. When athletes compare their capabilities to those of their teammates, this is damaging to their mental health and hinders their performance.

With athlete self-assessments, players can hit the "pause" button and take the time to rate how they feel about themselves. Rather than coaches ranking athletes on key components such as their technique, mechanics, and sportsmanship, athletes will have the chance to rank themselves in these areas. This provides an opportunity for self-reflection. Oftentimes, athletes are so caught up in winning the game that they forget the big picture of sports: growth and development.

2. Self-Awareness

How athletes think versus how they perform often shows misalignment. If you notice an athlete hitting a frequent number of air balls during games (although they seem to shoot 90% of their shots during practice), you might come to find out through their self-assessment that their nerves get the best of them during big games. Without a self-assessment shedding light on this, coaches would need to rely on one-on-one conversations with the athlete to reach this understanding, assuming the athlete is comfortable being vulnerable enough to open up.

Using SkillShark, you are able to conduct self-assessments, quickly analyze responses, and indicate where additional coaching is needed. Most importantly, you are allowing athletes to become self-aware, a huge building block to becoming confident.

3. Goal Setting

Setting goals helps trigger new behaviours while promoting a sense of self-mastery. And it’s proven to work. So why aren’t we as coaches promoting more personal goal-setting in sports?

Goal setting is an extremely powerful technique for enhancing performance. When your athletes can set goals based on personal milestones, this gives them something to work towards (and something to celebrate when they hit that goal!).

Goal setting is easy with SkillShark, as each self-assessment question is created by coaches. If you are asking an athlete to rank their ability on a scale of 1–10 within a specific skill, also include a question prompting them to set a SMART goal for themselves. I.e., "How confident are you in your ability to shoot layups?" Then, follow up with, "In the next 3 months, how many layups do you want to make?"

Self-assessment report

4. Relationship Building

Self-assessments provide transparency between coaches & athletes. Instead of a coach relying solely on observation, the athlete communicates their own perspective—what skills they feel confident about, where they struggle, and what they want to improve.

The information you learn about each athlete can be extremely valuable to shape your coaching strategy. If an athlete's self-assessment shows they lack confidence in their dribbling, you can add more practice drills to increase their comfort. If they are rather confident in this skill, introduce higher-pressure dribbling situations or enhance versatility (i.e., have them dribble with both hands)>

5. Improved Performance

Self-assessments will help your athletes become more aware of their abilities and self-diagnose relevant solutions for improvement.

Picture this: You are asking an athlete to rank their defense skills in hockey. With a self-assessment, you are asking them to self-reflect (and evaluate) on an area that they might not have given much thought to before.

The end result? The athlete is now self-aware that their defensive skills are an area they need to work on, they develop a "puck-possessive mentality" over time, and their performance is enhanced.

Wrapping Up

Getting into the minds of your athletes is no longer impossible to achieve. With athlete-self assessments, players now have a comfortable environment to reflect on their skills, and you can receive valuable information to refine your coaching strategies.

Interested in incorporating self-assessments in your next season? With SkillShark, create & distribute self-assessments in under 30 minutes! A key step in helping athletes boost confidence, increase self-awareness, and set meaningful goals