WSC Tryout RecommendationsWhen we need to formulate teams by ability, tryouts can provide important information and help compare different players that not all of the Coaches have seen play in regular season play. Therefore, the WSC Board believes that each age group should hold tryouts to provide this important input before formulating teams. LogisticsWe recommend two tryout sessions, each two hours long. Also, it is highly recommended that you recruit several (2-5) experienced coaches that are not in your age group to evaluate players in the tryouts. These independent evaluators should be at both sessions as the evaluating is cumulative. Use coaches in the age group to help with organizing and running the tryout games. All the players in your age group (and non-current players that might be interested) should be told to come to both sessions. Sending flyers to the appropriate grade in Winchester schools is a good idea as well.Tryout ActivitiesThe primary activity should be 6 v 6 games. The teams should be organized to be roughly balanced, if possible. The games might be 20-30 minutes long and then the teams switch who they are playing. The secondary activity is testing skills and techniques such as speed, kicking ability (right and left foot, distance and accuracy), ball handling and goalkeeping. Speed can be tested by a run of, say, 70 yards. For distance kicking, it is useful to see how far a player can kick the ball in the air. For accuracy kicking, one can play a game of “foot bowling” and set up cones to be knocked down 30 yards away. Ball handling can involve a dribble obstacle course. Goalkeeping would involve an evaluator tossing balls to the player and observing their technique. These skill and technique tests can be done at one end of the field, while others are playing in the small sided games. One or two teams would be at the activity end of the field while the others are playing in their games.EvaluatingThere should be multiple game evaluators (2-4) and one skills and techniques evaluator. The game evaluators should be given a form that has players’ numbers in the first column. The subsequent columns should be: Overall rating, ball handling, shooting, passing/teamwork, tackling, awareness/plays smart. The evaluators should use four ratings levels: Excellent, Good, Average and Poor. Space should be left for comments. The skills and techniques tests can be qualitative or quantitative. For example, speed can be stopwatch timed. Kicking for distance could be measured. The other skill and techniques tests are probably best judged qualitatively. Ideally a single evaluator would judge all the players for skills and techniques to maintain consistency. The AGC should tabulate the results by category and rank order the players by category for discussion by the coaches at the meeting for formulating teams.Setting ExpectationsIdeally, parents and players should know as much as possible about the tryouts and how judgments will be made. In the e-mail or flyer that announces the tryouts, the categories of evaluation could be mentioned. Then, at the beginning of the tryouts, it would be good to explain what is important to players and parents. Finally, we should be clear that ultimately, we will chose the best fit team for each player based on both tryouts and their regular season playing. |