How to evaluate players?

[stevethefootycoach]

Hi Bill

My name is Stephen Kennedy and I am the Coaches Coordinator and a coach for the McKenzie United Soccer Club in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. For Indoor Season I had our club purchase a license for the premiumsoccercoaching.com site and I can tell you that the coaches that have used the site have loved it!

I am wondering if you can help me a little. I have also now become the head of our club’s Technical Committee and one of our first orders of business is to look and at change our pre season player evaluation system. We have to put our older kids onto the appropriate teams (u10 and up) for the upcoming season.

Our evaluation sessions usually run 2 hours and we try to place between 30 to 50 kids on teams in one of these sessions. We are also trying to be consistent with our evaluation plan across all age groups. We try not to get the coaches involved in picking their teams as we believe that the kids should play at the level where they are best suited based on their skills as opposed to possibly being placed on a team because the coach picked them.

In the past our system has for the most part been okay and for some age groups has been pretty accurate in determining the players level. But in some cases it has failed. Here is how we have been running it.

1 V 1 We set up approximately 20 stations with 2 small goals and the players play 1 v 1 for a minute being able to score into either of the two goals. After the minute the winner typically would move left and the loser would either stay at the station or move right (we have done both ways) Typically we do 10 rounds and track everyone. In theory the top players should all end up at the top of the ladder so to speak. (We have also tried just moving one player left every time).

After the 1 v 1 sessions we go to 3 V 3 sessions with the teams randomly selected and evaluators watching one field.
I think the problems that we have run into are the following.

In the 1 V 1 drills some players have started goaltending more than being aggressive and as a result they tend to do well in the drills based on opportunity.

In the 3 V 3 some players just don’t get noticed (they either hang back and don’t get involved) or they just don’t stand out and we don’t get a lot of comments on them.

Do you know of any documentation that we can look at to revamp our evaluation process or so you have any suggestions on some drills we can use to see players easily and identify their skills? Perhaps an example of how one of your clubs does their player evaluations?
Some of our Age Group Coordinators are a little more gung ho than others. For example I ran 4 evaluation sessions last year for U12 girls, 1 session we had 5 skill stations that the players went through, the next was our normal process, and the third and fourth sessions was for girls that we either didn’t get enough information on or who had missed the first two sessions. I think that I was pretty good at sorting my players out. But unfortunately due to our climate (unpredictable snow and rain) and scheduled season start (End of April) we can’t always get in lots of sessions.

I would be happy to hear of any suggestions that you might have for drills or games that we can use. I have also downloaded some Evaluation and Tryout documents from other clubs and am trying to put together a system that we can be consistent with.

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[stevethefootycoach]

Bill's answer:

Sounds like you have your work cut out this spring trying to sort out all those players. I like the way you are trying to base your selections on objective data rather than managers preferences. It's always a challenge to make these sort of decisions in the best interests of players and teams.

I think it would be difficult to devise a single system that will be equally effective with a whole range of age groups. Having said that my suggestion would be to use a small number of tests that will give you information on different aspects of play. A few years ago I ran trials to select an under 17 squad for Berwick Rangers our local professional team in the Scottish Football League. I have attached a couple of files that I used then, perhaps they will be useful to you. I started with noting down which playing position each candidate was interested in. It soon became clear for example whether potential strikers were actually willing to take chances to shoot or defenders had good basic technique or midfielders had good passing ability etc.

Of course with younger children I would not include some of the physical tests that I included with the 17s.

Like you I used a ladder type competition but in my case I went for 4 v 4 in relatively small grids. 4 v 4 allows players opportunity to demonstrate movement, positioning and decision making. We played for a few minutes and then moved 2 players up, 2 down and 4 stayed on the same pitch with new teams. The scoring system is on the files.

From the data I made up a summary of players I definitely wanted, those who would not make the first team and those who were possibilities. We then held a competitive trail game on a separate evening to look at the lads performance in a proper match. Interestingly the outcomes from the game confirmed the data from the technical trial, there were few surprises.

There are a number of games and drills in Premium that would work in this sort of trial but he ones in the attached files worked very effectively on that occasion.

I hope some of the attached is useful, call it a free bonus from Premium just don't tell everybody else!

Please let me know how it goes.