Tryouts are a very stressful time for players, parents and coaches. Oftentimes times parents have unreal expectations of their son or daughter’s abilities and where they rank among other players. Tryouts are a short-term evaluation period which adds extra pressure on how coaches choose their rosters.
Being prepared and knowing which types of players you are looking for is key for coaches picking their team.
Here is a quick outline of how to prepare for tryouts:
1. What type of team would I love to coach? (not always going to happen but it’s nice to dream!)
- Team speed, skating ability
- Team puck skills
- Hard-working team
- Good attitudes, sportsmanship, body language, team player
- Compete
- 200-foot team, hard-working, play hard in every zone
2. What Skills Do I Want To Evaluate My Players On?
- Skating Skills
- Puck Skills (passing, puck handling)
- Shooting
- Work Ethic
- Attitude (body language, sportsmanship…)
- Positional Play
- Hockey IQ (awareness on the ice)
- Compete
3. What Method Do I Want To Use For Evaluations?
- Keeping your evaluations simple is often best, trying to limit your evaluation list to 4-6 areas makes it easy for evaluators and allows you to quickly review scores following each tryout session.
- Scoring your players can be done in a variety of ways whether you use a pen and paper, an online program, or an app, keeping your scoring system simple allows you to quickly separate your players when trimming down your roster.
- Scoring players on a scale of 1-5 or 1-7 (1 needs work, 5 or 7 excellent) makes it easy to give players a below or above-average score.
- Getting evaluators is important in order to gather data on each player, asking other coaches, friends or hockey people outside of the age group allows for some unbiased evaluations.
4. How do you cut down your roster?
- With proper evaluations, you now have information to help make your tough decisions when releasing players.
- Your evaluations also provide feedback for players or parents who want to know why they didn’t make your team. You can clearly show them areas of improvement and strong areas of their game.
- These evaluations help validate your final roster.
I wish all of you coaches the best of luck with fall tryouts, hopefully you all pick your “dream teams” and work hard throughout the season to make your players better.
Want to connect and share ideas with other hockey coaches from around the world? Join our Minor Hockey Coaches Group on Facebook, which has coaches from Canada, the United States, Europe and even Australia.
Looking for help to practice more of your skills? Check out the rest of our videos here.
