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 will 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.

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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 Evaluation Issues?

Evaluations can be complex and come with many hurdles. We have discovered a large amount 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 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 player’s progression over time.

The Link Between Software and Player Evaluation

Player evaluations are indispensable in sports, and today’s technology has transformed how we approach them. Firstly, utilizing hockey coaching apps, such as SkillShark, can simplify the player evaluation process, making team selection more efficient.

Secondly, coaches can track their players’ skill progression over a series of evaluations and integrate the proper drills into practices that will enhance players’ abilities.

Lastly, individual feedback provided to athletes through hockey coaching software can serve as the foundation for players to concentrate on their individual development. This holistic approach benefits the team and empowers each player to grow and thrive.

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 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. Using the right team management software and evaluation software together can help ensure the process is smooth and organized.
4. Make sure you understand how many stations will be required.
5. Know how much time each evaluator will need to measure athletes at each station.
6. Use evaluation software to help eliminate the evaluator bias. Evaluation software, such as SkillShark, will help eliminate evaluator bias by using normalized data.
7. Ensure you architect an evaluation that will test the right skills.
8. Use the player data that you collect. The data from your evaluations will provide invaluable insights on player development, helping you adjust your practice & game strategies accordingly.

Hockey Tryout Evaluation Template

A hockey tryout evaluation template is one of the most important pieces to get right during an evaluation. You will generally have two main categories, positional and goalie, to identify your players. Under each category, decide exactly what skills will be measured (this is fully customizable by your organization). Shown below are passing, skating, character, vision, and shooting skills.

Above is a pre-built template taken from SkillShark. Coaches can easily edit this template to evaluate any skill and metric that is most important to them when evaluating hockey players. Within each skill, coaches can determine exactly what metrics will be measured.

What are The Steps for Evaluating Hockey Players?

1. Ensure skills being evaluated are clear to athletes

Transparent communication is a good practice for any coach. If you don’t communicate to 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

Conducting an evaluation with the right skills, metrics, and categories is very important. Also, knowing “how” you’re going evaluate these athletes. For example, there is a Points System in which you will rate each player on a scale of 0-10 for each of the criteria you establish. We call this a subjective rating.

When building your criteria, SkillShark already has built-in evaluation templates where you can easily edit, add, or take away skills and metrics according to your coaching recipe. The template you design will then appear in the app. This means you can evaluate players right from your mobile device or tablet on any criteria you choose.

Evaluation template using SkillShark

3. Have a solid process for selecting teams

Selecting teams is generally a challenging process for coaches, as they often have a huge amount of bias, politics, and favoritism 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.

The Link Between Hockey Software and Player Evaluations

Player evaluations are indispensable in sports, and today’s technology has transformed how we approach them:

• Utilizing hockey coaching software, such as SkillShark, can simplify the player evaluation process, making team selection more efficient.
• Coaches can track their players’ skill progression over a series of evaluations and integrate the proper drills into practices that will enhance players’ abilities.
• Feedback provided to athletes can serve as the foundation for players to concentrate on their individual development. This holistic approach benefits the team and empowers each player to grow and thrive.