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 more 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, data is transferred from paper onto a spreadsheet (score by score), and 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, data is ready for you to view and analyze in a report format.

Improve Communication

With a sports coaching app, directly send athlete reports 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, it also increases transparency. Athletes will always be in the know of how their performance ranks on the ice, field, or court. No longer will they have to make assumptions as to what skills they perform well at and what needs work. Instead, all of that information will be readily available through individual athlete reports.

Individual athlete reports on SkillShark

Compare Athletes

Imagine this: You are in the final stages of making team placement decisions for your upcoming softball season. You have drafted 95% of the team, but you 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 on a sports coaching app

Make Quick Decisions

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

• Athlete scores are manually entered onto a printed form at an evaluation.
• All printed forms then have to be collected from each evaluator.
• Scores are transferred one by one from the printed form to an Excel spreadsheet.
• Player data is manipulated into tables to rank player performance from highest to lowest.
• Player data is manipulated into charts or graphs to show patterns and trends.

This process comes with a lot of manual labour, time, and energy. 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

Your sports organization or academy’s goal at any evaluation is to make it as easy as possible for all evaluators involved. Oftentimes, hundreds of athletes will be evaluated during a single evaluation, but they will often range in age, position, or region.

A sports coaching app lets you import players from your Excel spreadsheet or player management software (you can always manually add players), and then create player lists to further sort and organize these athletes by shared characteristics.

For instance, if you are conducting an evaluation and you only want to evaluate your U12 players that day, you can create a player list titled “U12” and add the appropriate athletes to that list.

Player lists also come in handy when analyzing data from the reports generated. If you are drafting players for a youth softball team (aged 9-12), you might want to create different player lists to segment athletes by age. I.e., Create a player list for 9, 10, 11 and 12-year-olds respectively. This is because it isn’t fair to compare the scores of a 9-year-old against the scores of a 12-year-old; these two age groups are both developing differently and therefore will perform differently.

In the example below, coaches will quickly filter their view to only see the group selected. In this case, they will be looking at how 12-year-olds scored across key softball metrics such as bunting, hitting, and speed. As 12-year-olds are only being compared to one another, this provides each athlete with an even playing field.

Player grid report

Wrapping Up

When using SkillShark, access to player data is available after each evaluation. The result? Coaches a clear perspective when implementing training strategies, creating teams, ranking players, and identifying top players.