Central Saanich Extreme Fastball

Luke Lampard at Central Saanich Extreme Fastball discusses how transitioning from pen-and-paper forms to SkillShark’s athlete evaluation app has improved player feedback and development.

1. What’s your best advice for coaches conducting athlete evaluations?

Be prepared. Select your evaluators, have your drills ready to go, and determine your scoring criteria before evaluation day.

2. What’s the biggest challenge when running evaluations?

There was a big lack of organization when running our evaluations. We found it challenging to keep track of all players who were present at an evaluation, as we didn’t have a system in place for player check-in. Plus, if any walk-ons arrived or certain players didn’t show, this was difficult for us to track.

3. How has navigating from pen-and-paper forms to an athlete evaluation app benefited your organization?

When using pen-and-paper forms, we had to navigate from player to player by rummaging through a large stack of papers. This task alone ate up hours of additional time.

With SkillShark’s athlete evaluation app, transitioning between players is extremely easy. I can quickly search for the player(s) I want to evaluate, and within seconds, their evaluation template is ready to go.

4. What feature of SkillShark have you enjoyed the most?

I have enjoyed the individual report feature the most. With SkillShark’s player report cards, we could score players and then physically show them their results. For example, if an athlete got 6/10 groundballs at an evaluation, their report card would show this. Athletes could then set goals for how many groundballs they wanted to hit at the next evaluation based on this concrete data.

5. How do you provide feedback to your athletes?

In the past, we gave players a single overall score. Based on this score, the top players automatically made the team and no further feedback was provided.

Now when providing feedback, we take the overall score out of it. Regardless of whether an athlete made the team or not, they would get feedback on what they did well and what they could improve on. We wanted to make it more of a learning experience for each player on the team, which was possible with SkillShark’s player report cards.