Top Tips for Evaluating Hockey Players

What are the most efficient strategies for evaluating hockey players at tryouts? Every year, hockey associations undertake what is considered a challenging evaluation process. This can be tension-filled and laborious, along with hours of data entry after the evaluation is complete.

In this article, we’re going to provide you with some hockey coaching tips. We discuss how to efficiently conduct hockey player evaluations, address some of the biggest challenges coaches often face, and share tips for what you can do to streamline your evaluation process today.

What Are the Problems With Evaluating Hockey Players?

As a coach, the 3 biggest areas that I saw in evaluating hockey players are:

• Athletes almost never received any formal feedback on their performance after an evaluation.
• Coaches spend countless hours doing data entry into spreadsheets and then have to try to make sense of the data.
• Parents often feel dissatisfied regarding their kids’ placement decisions. However, coaches rarely provide parents with information to give them a better understanding of the criteria used to make the decision.

What Is the Best Way to Deal With Common Hockey Evaluation Issues?

Evaluations can be complex and come with many hurdles. We have discovered that a large number of these complexities can be solved by eliminating the use of paper and spreadsheets during evaluations. Not only do pen-and-paper evaluations waste hours of time, but at the end of it all, very little is done with the data, and very little feedback is provided to athletes.

For the past 10 years, we have developed a hockey player evaluation app to take away the pains that many coaches experience during evaluations. It’s amazing to think that coaches can now view instant rankings, compare players, and even track their players’ progression over time.

How Can I Evaluate Hockey Players?

When evaluating hockey players, ensure you design an evaluation template that will test the right skills, such as skating, shooting, game sense, and passing.

Secondly, take proper measures to eliminate evaluator bias and ensure that the skills being assessed are clear to your evaluators for accurate scoring.

8 tips for conducting hockey evaluations:

1. Ensure the skills being assessed are clear to evaluators. For example, “agility” could mean different things to different people.
2. Use a mobile evaluation app as opposed to pen and paper. This ensures easy and accurate evaluations of athletes.
3. Have a solid check-in process to make sure all registered athletes and walk-ons are accounted for.
4. Determine how many drill stations will be required.
5. Know how much time each evaluator will need to measure athletes at each station.
6. Ensure you architect an evaluation that will test the right skills.
7. Use the player data that you collect to compare & rank players and draft teams.

What are The Steps for Evaluating Hockey Players?

1. Ensure the skills being evaluated are clear to athletes

Transparent communication is a good practice for any coach. If you don’t communicate with players properly, you risk them putting extra effort into the wrong skills or simply not understanding the drills they’re being assessed on.

For example, let’s say you have drills that are focused on agility and speed when moving the puck. In this case, you will need to explain quick puck control instead of showing off fancy footwork.

2. Establish the right evaluation criteria

Before an evaluation begins, choose the relevant skills you want to evaluate and the type of scores (subjective, time-based objective score, or comment only). For example, if you are rating players on their shooting accuracy, you can set this to be a subjective score with a fixed rating scale of 0-10.

When building your criteria, SkillShark has customizable templates where you can easily add or take away skills according to your coaching recipe. Simply click “Add Metric,” choose the metric type, name your score, and set the relevant criteria.

Evaluation template using SkillShark

3. Have a solid process for selecting teams

Selecting teams is generally a challenging process that comes with a huge amount of bias, politics, and favouritism that may cause headaches. When using SkillShark’s evaluation software, coaches can work around the bias more effectively. Player data is readily available and should be the primary determinant used for any team placement decision.

Wrapping Up

When it comes to your hockey evaluations, think SkillShark. An all-in-one app to score your athletes at any evaluation, access real-time player data, and provide customized feedback. What does this all mean for you? An easy, objective, and quick evaluation process that leaves you with strong team placement decisions.