How To Improve Hockey Tryouts With Evaluation Software

Every hockey tryout follows the same tedious process: hundreds of registrants, numerous evaluators with clipboards, and a stack of paper evaluation forms to make sense of afterward. By the time scores are typed into spreadsheets, rankings and comparison reports are built, and teams are drafted, days have passed.

Hockey evaluation software takes the busywork out of tryouts, so you spend less time on data entry and more time on what matters: building strong teams and helping players improve. This blog breaks down how it helps you run faster tryouts, draft teams with confidence, and give every player prompt feedback.

Cut Time in Half

Traditional hockey tryouts come with plenty of tedious work: collecting paper score sheets from evaluators, re-entering every score into Excel, and building reports by hand. The gap between the last tryout and draft day can stretch to days, or even weeks.

With hockey evaluation software, coaches report cutting evaluation time in half with one app that does most of the grunt work for them:

1. Build your template. Customize your evaluation template with the skills and metrics that fit your coaching needs.

2. Invite your evaluators. Add them to your event in a few clicks.

3. Score from any device. Evaluators enter scores, add comments, and attach videos right from their phones or tablets.

4. Skip the data entry. SkillShark saves scores as soon as they’re entered and automatically turns them into player reports.

5. Review results instantly. Open any report, choose the players and skills you want, and view player rankings and side-by-side comparisons. Make confident team placement decisions in hours.

Confidently Draft Teams

Say you’re drafting forwards and want to rank them from strongest to weakest. Not every skill matters equally for a forward player, so a simple average of tryout scores won’t give you an accurate picture.

That’s where SkillShark’s tiered draft reports come in. Assign a weight to each skill (for example, skating 40%, puck handling 20%, shooting 20%, and positioning 20%), and SkillShark gives you a clear ranked list based on a single overall score. From there, you can use those rankings to draft either ranked or balanced teams right in the app:

• Ranked: Groups players of similar skill together. I.e., All top forwards on one team, intermediate forwards on a 2^nd team, and beginners on a 3^rd team.

• Balanced: Ensures each team has a similar overall skill level. I.e., A top, intermediate, and beginner player are placed on one team; therefore, all teams have roughly the same skill level.

Provide Post-Tryout Feedback

Pen-and-paper tryouts leave athletes waiting for feedback that’s often inconsistent or never comes. Meanwhile, coaches are buried in the stressful work of tallying scores, calculating team averages, and pulling together development resources for each athlete. The outcome? Team placements based on gut feel instead of data, and athletes with no clear path to improvement.

Similar to how player rankings & comparison reports are auto-generated by SkillShark, so are player report cards:

• All data in one place: Scores, comments and videos are added to an athlete’s report card from each day of tryouts. *If athletes are evaluated on multiple days, they receive the average of their daily scores.

• Built-in benchmarks: Team averages are calculated for each skill and can be displayed on the report card, so athletes see how they compare to their peers

• Personalized development resources: Upload resources ahead of tryouts, like PDFs or YouTube links. If an athlete scores below a set threshold on a skill, SkillShark automatically attaches a developmental resource to their report card.

Wrapping Up

Run your next tryout smoothly with SkillShark’s hockey evaluation software. Evaluators score athletes right from their phones or tablets, and every score, comment, and video is instantly saved into ready-made reports.

From there, you can view rankings and side-by-side comparisons to build balanced teams, or send polished report cards to athletes and parents with a single click.