How To Effectively Evaluate Hockey Players

Tryouts, camps, clinics, showcases. Regardless of when you are evaluating hockey players, the task can be seen as strenuous due to its time constraints, managing a large number of athletes, and even the administrative pressures. But with a streamlined process in place, you can reduce the stress & save time across all hockey evaluations.

In this guide, we share tips for how you can evaluate hockey players quickly, accurately, and most importantly, with confidence. With these measures in place, you can focus on what really matters: identifying top talent to build and maintain a strong team.

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.

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 (for tryouts only).

What are The Steps for Evaluating Hockey Players?

1. Communicate drills clearly

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 proper hockey evaluation criteria

Before an evaluation begins, choose the relevant skills you want to evaluate your hockey players on. Ensure you are evaluating players across a mix of technical, tactical, physical, and even team skills:

• Tactical skills- Positioning, anticipation, and game awareness.
• Technical skills- shooting, stickhandling, passing, and skating.
• Physical skills- strength, agility, and coordination.
• Team skills- communication, work ethic, and coachability.

As mentioned above, ensure the skills being assessed are clear to all your evaluators. Host a debrief session ahead of hockey tryouts and run through each skill. Explain what a perfect ’10’ means. I.e., In skating, a perfect score of 10 would be a player who has powerful push-offs, a controlled glide, strong edgework, and smooth transitions. Taking the time to explain the scoring system and what to look for ensures each evaluator provides accurate & unbiased scores.

3. Select teams fairly (for tryouts only*)

Selecting teams is generally a challenging process that comes with a huge amount of bias and takes up hours. Picture this: After an evaluation, you have to sort through a stack of handwritten papers, transfer that data into Excel, and then format it into reports. Otherwise, how else will you accurately analyze performance data?

With SkillShark, coaches can make quick and unbiased decisions when forming hockey teams. Here’s how it works:

• Access SkillShark’s auto-generated reports immediately after hockey evaluations. *Data from evaluators is stored on the back-end and formatted into reports ready for viewing.
• Select which report you would like to view. See a high-level overview of your players’ rankings (view how they rank overall or within a specific skill), or select players to compare where their strengths vs weaknesses lie.
• Use report data to make quick, effective team placement decisions.

View a high-level overview of players’ skills after a hockey evaluation

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.