Steps to Consider When Running Your First Athlete Evaluation

Stress can run high during athlete evaluations as there are drills to plan, schedules to align, and teams to be selected. Not to mention coaches need to sort out the finer details, like which evaluators to use, how to check-in athletes, and how to organize athletes for easy assessment.

If you are about to conduct your first ever athlete evaluation, we walk through 5 tips you don’t want to miss to ensure it is smooth sailing!

1. Hold a planning meeting

The first step to running a successful athlete evaluation should be to hold a general planning meeting. This meeting should be held a few weeks prior an evaluation and host all those who will be involved in the event.

This meeting should determine the following:

• What drills will be evaluated.
• The number of drills that will be evaluated.
• Number of evaluators needed.
• How scores will be inputted by evaluators (rather than a pen-and-paper model, athlete evaluation software can help here!)
• The location and length of the evaluation. Note: The length of the evaluation will largely depend on how long each drill station is, while allowing time for a proper warm-up and cooldown).

2. Choose your evaluators

There will likely be the need to have extra bodies to help run the athlete evaluation, such as assistant coaches or paid third-party groups (i.e., unbiased evaluators). Make sure your registration starts far enough ahead of the evaluation date so that you have time to get a general idea of numbers and figure out how many extra evaluators you will need.

A couple days before the evaluation, have a brief meeting with all evaluators. Use this time to inform them on what skill(s) they will be evaluating and what criteria they should look for when scoring that skill(s). As a general rule of thumb, it is a good idea to have one evaluator at each station.

For instance, if you assign an evaluator to score hockey players on their edge work (on a scale from 0-10), inform evaluators what key aspects constitute a perfect “10.” When evaluators are informed about the specifics of what they should be looking for, scores will be more accurate.

3. Create a schedule

Setting a detailed schedule keeps everyone on the same page, including evaluators, assistant coaches, and even athletes and parents. The schedule should ensure that there is ample time to run the drills and also allow time for tasks such as drill explanation, transition time, water breaks, and warm up/cool-downs.

4. Utilize software

An athlete evaluation software streamlines the evaluation process. Coaches can create a custom evaluation template before the evaluation (no more printing off dozens upon dozens of evaluation sheets), and any evaluator invited to the app can use SkillShark to enter player scores. Data has a minimal chance of being lost, stolen, or misused, as data in stored and calculated on a centralized platform—available in report-ready format when you are ready to switch to “analysis mode.”

5. Educate your evaluators

Most of the evaluators that you have selected will have already evaluated a sports event before. However, with every evaluation comes different rules and guidelines. Evaluators will often be told by coaches what to look for when at a specific station.

For example, suppose an evaluator is going to be at the dribbling station for a basketball evaluation. In that case, you might tell them that you are looking for players who have effective control of the ball, progress steadily toward the basket, and maintain a safe distance from the defender. If an athlete excels at each of these areas of dribbling, you can tell the evaluator to give the athlete a perfect score.

6. Provide athlete feedback

One of the largest issues with athlete evaluations is that players don’t get the opportunity to receive feedback on their performance. What criteria were they scored on? How did they fare against the team average?

By using athlete evaluation software, coaches can share this information with athletes (and their parents) instantly through athlete report cards.

Providing detailed athlete feedback through an individual report on SkillShark

Wrapping Up

Evaluations are hectic, but there are tools out there to make them easier. SkillShark is modernizing the approach and saving coaches time along the way. Coaches report saving over 50+ hours by using the evaluation software.