Benefits of A Sports Coaching App

While there is an app for everything these days, it is no different in the world of sports. A sports coaching app has one goal: to make athlete evaluations easier.

Sports organizations, clubs, academies, and scouts can all benefit from an intuitive application to effectively score athletes and analyze player data.

Reduce Evaluation Time

Time is our greatest asset, yet many coaches still evaluate athletes using pen and paper. Scores are written down, and data is transferred from paper onto a spreadsheet (score by score). Then, coaches have to figure out what to do with the data once it's collected in the spreadsheet.

Having a sports coaching app where you can collect player data from a mobile device or tablet saves coaches countless hours. Once data is entered, it is instantly ready for analysis! No more having to worry about making an error with data entry, the data is ready for you to view and analyze in a report format.

Improve Communication

With a sports coaching app, athlete reports are sent via email to both athletes and their parents. As direct feedback is provided, sports coaches won't have to spend time before or after practice conducting one-on-one feedback sessions (where information might not get fully processed by the receiving party).

Athlete reports not only improve the lines of communication between coaches, athletes, and parents, but they also increase transparency. They’ll no longer need to guess which skills they excel at and which need improvement—individual athlete reports will provide all that information clearly and instantly.

Individual athlete reports on SkillShark

Compare Top Athletes

Imagine this: You are in the final stages of making team placement decisions for your upcoming softball season. You have drafted 97% of the team, but are stuck deciding which remaining athletes to draft for the center fielder and pitcher positions. With two positions left to draft, you want an effective analysis tool to compare players.

On a sports coaching app, you can use the strengths vs. weaknesses report to compare up to 3 players and make your final drafting picks confidently.

In the example below, three softball players are compared against one another on their bunting performance, looking at their mechanics, placement, and contact. As coaches can compare these softball players on their bunting performance, they are now able to accurately choose which athlete would be a strong batter.

Strengths vs Weaknesses Report in SkillShark

Make Quick Decisions

Typically, the process to decide which players make the team goes a little something like this:

1. Athlete scores are manually entered onto a printed form at an evaluation.

2. All printed forms then have to be collected from every evaluator.

3. Scores are transferred one by one from the printed form to an Excel spreadsheet.

4. Charts or graphs must be configured in order to identify player insights.

This process is time-consuming, error-prone and laborious. However, a sports coaching app is an all-in-one platform. Scores are entered through a mobile device, reports are automatically generated for further customization by coaches, and as a result, quicker and more informed team decisions are made.

Segment Players

Oftentimes, hundreds of athletes will be evaluated during a single evaluation, but they will often range in age.

For example, if you are drafting players for a youth softball team (ages 9-12), you might want to create different player lists to segment athletes by age.

With a sports evaluation app such as SkillShark, you can easily create separate player lists for 9, 10, 11, and 12-year-olds. Since each age group develops at its own pace, comparing a 9-year-old’s performance to that of a 12-year-old wouldn’t be accurate or fair. During analysis, you can filter the data by age group. In other words, you can filter your view to only see scores for the 9-year-olds or 10-year-olds evaluated. From there, you can choose the top performers from each age group to create a well-rounded and competitive team.

Wrapping Up

When using SkillShark, access to player data (in the form of pre-generated reports) is available after each evaluation. The result? Coaches have a clear perspective when creating teams or implementing training strategies.