How to Improve Volleyball Tryouts With Evaluation Software

Gathering evaluators, checking in players, and running drills are all time-consuming tasks when running volleyball tryouts. Not to mention, the process of scoring & drafting players can be an added headache if you aren’t utilizing the proper resources.

A volleyball evaluation software comes to the rescue for coaches when conducting any type of evaluation—from tryouts to clinics to mid-season evaluations. One intuitive app to score players, instantly access evaluation data, and make quick drafting decisions.

This blog explores the top three reasons why volleyball evaluation software should be used for volleyball evaluations over traditional methods like pen-and-paper forms.

Improving Volleyball Tryouts with Software

1. Score players on your mobile device

The problems with pen-and-paper evaluations are as follows:

• Print stacks of evaluation forms (usually one sheet for each player).

• Ensure all evaluators receive the correct form prior to any tryout, camp, or clinic.

• Have evaluators (and any coaches who score players) enter each score one by one.

Entering the scores for players should be the easy part of evaluations. However, with the large stack forms that evaluators have in their hands, evaluators will often misenter scores for the wrong player, posing problems down the road when it comes time for analysis.

With volleyball evaluation software, scoring players is one fluid process. Simply upload your players, customize your evaluation template, invite evaluators, and score players through mobile devices. Rather than typing in scores, evaluators can use a simple slider button to enter scores, drastically reducing the chance of misentered information.

Scoring players on volleyball evaluation software

2. Instantly access data after evaluations

Multiple evaluators are typically present at any tryout. What does this mean for you? More evaluation papers to collect. What happens if you don’t hand-collect each paper from an evaluator? If a score sheet doesn't get collected, it will be impossible to conduct a thorough analysis to determine suitable players for your team.

With volleyball evaluation software like SkillShark, every evaluator will have access to the app right on their mobile device (at no extra cost to you). Instead of locating each evaluator at the end of tryouts to hand-collect their papers, all scores are automatically stored on the platform the minute they are entered.

When it comes time to view player insights after an evaluation, coaches will head to the reporting section of SkillShark to instantly view player results.

SkillShark has been an invaluable tool for our tryouts. We have used it with nearly 400 athletes and it has been a great addition to our participants and parents, who now receive professional-level report cards after each tryout. We will be SkillShark users for life!

Justin Dee. High-performance Director — Delta Region of USA Volleyball

3. Leverage real-time data from reports

Reporting. A task that is undeniably avoidable by any coach. With pen-and-paper forms, you will likely spend HOURS manually inputting scores into Excel. After that tedious process, you will then need to adjust formatting and styling options in Excel to organize the data into clear and readable reports. 

SkillShark's volleyball evaluation software eliminates the need for tedious data transfer & report setup. As scores are entered by you or any evaluator, they are automatically stored on the platform. What does this mean for you? Right after an evaluation—before even getting home—you will have access to pre-generated reports that you can comb through to make quick drafting decisions.

Leveraging SkillShark’s intuitive reporting feature, here is an example of a report that can be used to make team placement decisions:

Player ranking grid on SkillShark

Wrapping Up

Make your next evaluation swift & seamless by using SkillShark's volleyball evaluation software. Save yourself the unnecessary headaches and hardships of running an evaluation with pen-and-paper forms.

Instead, switch to volleyball evaluation software that manages every step of the evaluation process for you. From inviting evaluators and scoring players to collecting data and analyzing player insights, SkillShark takes care of the details for you. Therefore, you can focus your time & energy on what matters most: coaching your team to success.