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0:00 Hey coaches, welcome back. Coach KW here and today we're going to tackle the topic of triyouts. And I've just recently survived that process of coordinating it for my town. And one of
0:09 the things we do with our process that u we feel is a little bit unique is that we really have tried to make it about the players. It's player focused, player
0:16 centered is what we like to say is our program and you know every year we try to do a little bit better with that. And uh we are going to talk a little bit
0:22 about that as I mentioned it in my last video and folks uh reached out and said they'd love to hear more. So here we are. Um, we're going to go through how
0:30 we set up the process, how we run it on the field, and then how we score it and create our teams. And, um, we'll also talk a little bit about the outcomes and
0:38 how coaches have felt about it when we made this transition. This whole process is based on historical knowledge. I've been on the board for 10 plus years now.
0:45 I've seen lots of different ways to do tryyouts and the things that we do today are a reflection of things that we've had happen in the past and we've tried
0:52 to improve upon. And that's how we here today. Now, your program may be bigger, smaller, different than ours. You might not be able to use any of the things I
0:59 do in terms of how we do it. But I'm hoping that this inspires you to find ways to make this more about the players and less about the coaches and their
1:07 control over a game or over a team and more about how can we get groups of kids to show themselves in their best possible way and show their abilities
1:16 and make sure they're on teams based on their abilities and not who the coach knows or is lives next to as we all know sometimes happens. So, let's take a look
1:24 at that. Uh, a quick thank you for all those who have liked, subscribed, and shared. You guys have share so many videos, which is amazing. It must mean
1:32 that there must be something in here that's useful to you or for other people. So, if you're one of those folks, um, make sure you're subscribed.
1:38 It really helps the channel and the thumbs up also helps other folks find it as well. So, thanks a lot. Okay, so let's talk about our setup and our
1:45 situation. So, uh, you get sort of the ground rules of where we're coming from.
1:48 So, uh, we're a town-based travel program. in our neck of the woods. All the towns uh around in the state basically have a local nonprofit organization that runs uh the youth
1:59 soccer in their program in their area.
2:01 Uh we are one of those. Uh we offer in town and travel programs in town is exactly what it sounds like, which is you sign up, we make teams just from
2:10 kids, you know, amongst the town, split them up, and they play against each other every weekend. For travel, we do town-based travel. So, in our state, there are some regional leagues. They're
2:18 roughly based upon uh county lines. At least historically, they were. It's a lot more fluid nowadays and a little bit different, but basically, we play between uh let's say 11 to 15 uh cities
2:28 and towns that are around our geographical area. And we travel and host those teams throughout the thing.
2:34 Multiple divisions. We're looking for levels of teams. So, hence we have tryyouts to try and make teams based on the levels of ability that we have in
2:41 our town. Uh we do grades three through seven. A lot of towns do grade eight.
2:45 However, our high school starts at grade eight for reasons. So, we lose those players at the high school. Our league is a traditional U10, U12, U14, but we
2:53 build our teams by single grade whenever we can because we found for developmental reasons the players tend to stick together more consistently. So, year overyear that team is mostly intact
3:04 and so therefore they can develop year after year versus when you have those mixed grades, half your team leaves every year. And as a coach, it's really
3:10 hard to develop your players when half your team is new every year. We have in general for each age, I mean grade/gender, we have somewhere between 25 and 40 kids trying out. Will this
3:20 process work if there was many more?
3:23 Hard for us to say. All we know is it's working for us and it has for the last 3 to 5 years. Uh our goal is to place as
3:29 many kids as we can on a travel team, but sometimes whether it's based on roster exceptions, numbers, things like that, it's just not always possible. But that's our goal. We always have in town
3:37 as a fallback. So, uh, let's say, you know, 25 kids tried it out and that age group, you know, the max or the best roster, max roster is 12, for example.
3:46 Well, 25, you can't divide it by 12. Uh, so somebody's probably going to miss out, but tends to be as many players as possible, we get on travel programs. And
3:55 as part of our roster process, while the league tells us our max, we really set our rosters to be most advantageous to get playing time for kids. We want our
4:02 coaches to have enough players to have a reasonable amount of subs and be able to withstand injuries, absences, etc., etc., but not so have so many players
4:11 that playing time is in fact impacted by having too many kids. Again, having 14 kids on a 7v7 roster means you can literally put one side out for the first
4:19 half and then sit those kids for a whole second half. That's not fun for anyone.
4:22 Here's the biggie. Coaches do not pick their teams in our town. Coaches are evaluated by a slate of neutral coaches from in town. And one of the key
4:31 components of that is if you're a part of that slate when it comes to time for evaluations, you cannot evaluate a age group in which you either coach or have
4:40 a kid in. So I coach and have a fifth grade boy. I cannot run an evaluation score team for that age group because it just doesn't look good. We try to make
4:50 sure there's no conflict of interest or appar you know even a appearance of conflict of interest. So as player development director in my town, it's my job to run triyouts. I will handpick
4:59 five to seven coaches throughout the town basically. And I tend to look for coaches who have experiences with our teams in our towns and perhaps more. I
5:08 mean, I've done high school varsity all the way to prek and back again in a little club. We've got some coaches who played in college, etc., etc. But the
5:15 idea is we're looking for coaches who are knowledgeable about the types of players we have in a town program and what we're looking for versus, you know,
5:22 some idealized sort of format. And we tend to we use a consistent pool during that tryyout process. So we have the same sorts of opinion. So if I rank kids
5:31 on general average lower than the next person when the scores come out, it doesn't impact the kid just because I'm a hard grader and somebody's an easy
5:38 grader. It's consistent across the board. So we'll have five to seven in that pool. We strive to have at least three on the field at any one time for
5:45 mathematical reasons. The more the marrier. We tend to have four or five every session, but having that pool lets us be able to handle folks who have
5:52 conflicts. Many ask, well, how do the current coaches get their give their input? because they know the kids best, quote unquote. So, what we do is we ask
6:00 our current coaches to pre-rank their teams before tryyouts. So, we use our uh PlayMetrics application to send a a form out to the coaches that basically says,
6:08 "Hey, here's your roster. Now, rank them from one to whatever." So, for example, 13 kids on a roster, one through 13. Um, and each coach does that for their
6:16 teams. And we use that to set the try out flights that we'll talk about about the onfield process there. For our triyouts, we play in the format the kid
6:24 is going into. So, for example, in fourth grade, you're going into fifth grade next year. That's 99. So, the triot will be playing 99. We don't do
6:33 drills and skills and uh small-sided games. And we have a couple of reasons for that. One is what we have found is that if a kid hasn't actually seen the
6:43 drill beforehand, they struggle with having to do it under pressure in a try out environment. We would send out the drills that we were going to do to the
6:50 coaches ahead of time to say, "Hey, use these drills for your kids." So they when they come to tryyous and inexplicably there'd be coaches that would just refuse to help their kids
6:58 perform better at triyouts because they would never use the drill because they didn't like them, they didn't agree with it, etc., etc. And so that just hurt the
7:04 kids when they came to tryyous. Smalls of games is similar, but they've got we got two reasons for that. on again if a coach isn't utilizing small-sided games
7:12 often, which I don't know why they wouldn't, but it happens in the past.
7:16 And you know, sometimes we have to struggle to get our coaches on board with some things that we want them to do. This is one of them. The kids don't
7:22 know necessarily how to play in that format very well. So, they don't show their best abilities. On top of that, if you're not an experienced coach, sometimes watching smallsided games can
7:32 be hard for people to know what to look for in those player actions on those fields because you're used to looking at players in a bigger picture. And so
7:40 without that experience as a coach andor experience running teams in small side of games, what we found is the combination of the kids not used to it
7:47 and the coaches not perhaps being uh uh trained enough in it that there was a mismatch in what they saw and how they ranked players. So we have simply just
7:55 gone to we play the game and we have found that to be very effective for the past 5 years or so. Like many groups we have four categories. Technical, what
8:03 they do with the ball, tactical, what they do without the ball, their positioning, their roles and responsibilities on the field. We do physical, speed, endurance, and most
8:10 importantly for us mobility. Players need to be able to be connected to the play. And that's where um field size sometimes comes into play in uh those
8:18 gap years when players move from one size to the other. If you can't move with the ball, they can't move with the play, you're not an effective player.
8:25 And lastly, engagement. And we use this term specifically because too many times coaches are looking for I want that player to be aggressive. Where's the aggressive player? And aggression has
8:33 part of the game, but sometimes you know those coaches that seems to be their primary focus is does that kid want to run through a brick wall? But the
8:41 problem is you can run through a brick wall and pull yourself out of position.
8:44 We want engagement. Is the player engaged in the play? Are they actively going in for tackles? But when the ball isn't with them, are they supporting their teammates? Are they vocal? Are
8:52 they maintaining their shape and are ready to be part of the play when the ball gets there? Are they passive? Kind of standing off on the side waiting for
8:59 the ball to come to their side of the field before they activate. So that's why we use engagement specifically when we're looking at players. Um we use a
9:07 one through five scale. Five being the best in the pool, one being the most developing. So let's talk about our field process. We use 9v9 as example. So
9:13 the sheets, here's an example on the screen. When the sheets come to the field, the coach's pre-ranking allows us to sort the players from top to bottom.
9:20 One team, two team, three team in town players that are new coming into the program, whatever it might be, and we and they're sorted from top to bottom
9:27 via their rank. So, we will take the top nine players in a 9v9 system, put them on one side of the field. We take the next nine players, put them on the
9:34 second side of the field. We have them play. Now, that helps out the evaluators to set the standard because in that top nine, you're going to have two, three,
9:41 four players who are going to be those players who are all fives, the best players within that pool. That sets the standard. Those are the exemplars. And
9:48 then from that, it makes it easier for the evaluators to judge the other players next to that standard to be like, if there are fives, that player is
9:55 a mix of five and fours. This player is some fours and some threes. Three is banging average for the group. So, that's where most of our players land
10:02 into. And one and two are those developing players. The top nine come off after a little bit once I've set the standard and we'll bring in the third
10:09 best nine to play against the second best nine. And now what we're looking for in this process is those exceptions, those players that stick up and out of
10:16 the process with whether positively or negatively as they're out on the field because hopefully those rankings are mostly level. And the idea is we're trying to find those players that look
10:26 like they're outperforming their ranking for whatever reason. Maybe the coach got it wrong. Maybe the field size is more advantageous for a particular player. um or the field size is negatively
10:35 impacting a player who's a slow developer, whatever that might be. It makes it easier for the evaluators to pick those kids out. We get through all the kids that are on uh the sheet and
10:43 then the evaluators are able to ask the sideline coach for specific players and specific combinations so they can take a look at them again to evaluate. So maybe
10:50 you've seen a couple of groups, maybe there's a new player in town that moved into town or was playing in town soccer and their first time with travel. We
10:56 don't know a lot about them and they really performed way higher than what it looked like in their pool. We'll have that player come out and play with maybe
11:02 two team players and one team players to see if that was just a appearance bias based on the players are on the field at the time or whether or not their skills
11:11 actually are in that range. And that's how we run our triyouts based on the pool of players we have in front of us.
11:15 Importantly, we do not evaluate keepers separately. These are developmental players. These are players that are still growing. Nobody should be pigeonholed to any one position at all
11:23 even through seventh grade as far as we're concerned. And so we don't evaluate keepers separately. We're looking for better soccer players. And then we tell our coaches, you will
11:31 always be able to find a few players that will take a shift in net, whether that's for half of a game or a quarter of a game or whatever it might be. But
11:37 we're not interested in trying out players who are just keepers because that player who gravitates it in grade three and four turns out in seventh grade to be 5'4, they're never going to
11:45 play in high school in a full-size net.
11:47 It's just not going to happen. And so we try not to let that happen. We want our players to be good players. And let's be frank, keepers need to be just as good
11:55 nowadays with their feet as their hands.
11:57 So being good field players is the primary consideration. Coaches then when they get their rosters just figure it out from there. And we've never had a problem in the three to five years we've
12:06 been doing this. We tell some of our players, hey, you might play for 15 minutes total and it might be for 45.
12:10 That's not an indication of how you did.
12:12 Those players who are quote unquote the all fives, you can pretty pick them. You can pick them out pretty quickly, right?
12:17 We're going to pull those players off because we don't need to see them anymore. We want to see those other players and we're looking for those again those exceptions that might stick
12:23 out to be able to move up or move down.
12:25 Well, a lot of times we'll take those all five players and stick them in net so that the players who need to be in the field are getting their shifts in
12:32 the field because we don't need to see those all five players. We just stick them in net and that's where they go.
12:36 Um, our current process takes about 60 minutes per age/gender. So, the boys and the girls combined will take us about two hours with a break in between to do
12:44 check-ins and stuff like that. Maybe it would take longer with more players, but this is what's worked for us in that 25 to 45 uh pool in each gender and age
12:54 group. All right. So, what's the process look like after the fact? So, again, I'll show you the sheets here real quick. Here's what they look like.
13:00 Coaches circle the numbers. Sometimes they circle two numbers to mean a 0.5.
13:04 So, we circle three and four, that's 3.5. It's a pain in the butt for me typing them in, but if that's what works, that's what works. Um, and
13:10 they're entered into this spreadsheet that we have that we take all the numbers one through five for each evaluator. They go down for each player.
13:16 And then it takes those numbers. And right now, our ranking system, each one of the categories is equally rated at 25%. So they get a maximum of up to 25
13:25 per score area. And you can see on the sample spreadsheet here how that works.
13:29 What is nice about our spreadsheet is if we want to change our waiting, let's say in the younger ages we want to downrate downrank physical so that we can uh
13:37 eliminate some of that big kid equals better kid bias that sometimes happens.
13:41 We could downrate physical and maybe make that 20% and make tactical or technical 30%. We can do that right in a spreadsheet per age group um and rewe
13:50 the whole thing very quickly. And obviously it's a 100 point scale. So 0 to 100, the best being 100, zero. No kid ever gets a zero. But that's how it
13:58 works here. How do we handle players who couldn't make tryyous through injury, conflict, etc., etc. I can make a whole video just on how much effort it is just
14:06 to pick try out now just to make sure that players get here. Postcoid seems like every elementary school now has a million endofear activities and it's been so hard to get a dates to just
14:16 figure out when all the fifth graders could show up on a single time. It's incredibly incredibly complicated. But let's say we have a player who can't make it because they were injured. What
14:24 do we do? So that pre-ranking comes into play. So let's say that player was ranked uh you know was sixth on their team and the players ranked fourth and
14:32 fifth scored an 85 and the players that were ranked below them seventh and eighth got a 75. We can assign that player a score of 80 because we are
14:39 relatively sure that that player is going to be in between those two groups of players. If scores were way off, we may then go and talk to assistant
14:46 coaches or other coaches or people who know that age group a little bit better to find out was there something wrong with the with the um either the kid that
14:52 day or something else. But it tends to work for us pretty well. Then the sheets are just sorted by score rank from top to bottom. We look at how many kids we
15:00 are. We look at what size rosters we want to have for grouping and we start to slice it up. So maybe I have uh 25 27 kids tried out for a 9 by9 fifth grade.
15:09 I might make the one team 13 kids and the two team 14 kids. And that is the roster as it gets set. We take those rosters, we give it to the coaching
15:18 committee who at the same time is evaluating the applications that parents have put in to be a travel coach. They match up those names with where their
15:26 kids landed and then they find which teams have coaches and which teams they may need to find coaches for. So once all the coaches are assigned, then and
15:34 only then do those coaches actually see their roster. So again, the team is picked without a coach actually being assigned to that team quite yet. Coaches have a very limited option to be able to
15:45 move players. Players have to be on the bubble. They have to be in the bottom of one team and the top of another team.
15:50 And their score has to be within two points in order to for us to even entertain an option to say, "Hey, I'd like to swap these two players." That
15:57 stops the whole that's my neighbor's kid, that's my cousin's, you know, kid, that's my niece or my nephew, etc., etc., or hey, the person I was hoping to
16:04 assistant coach with, his kid didn't make the one team, is on the two team. I want to move him up. It stops all that horse trading, all that sort of worst
16:12 part of uh parentr run youth coaching, youth sports, and makes it so it's about where the player lands, not who the player knows. Let's briefly talk about
16:20 some of the outcomes. So, first of all, hopefully you can see how this is player centered. They're judged by their abilities and not the relationships that the adults have. This process really
16:29 stops that whole process of I want that kid because my assistant coach I want my buddy to be my assistant coach and while his kid is wouldn't not make that team
16:37 on try out I'm going to pick them anyways. It really is about ability. And so what that means is players every year move up and down on teams based on where
16:45 they are in their development because development is not a straight line.
16:48 Couple that with changing in field sizes, late bloomers, etc., etc. Players need to be where they're the best, surrounded by a group of players who are around their abilities so that they're
16:59 both challenged and have some success.
17:01 Our idea here is we make the teams much more homogeneous across the board. So they can operate so much better collectively because everybody is within their same relative ability level um
17:12 given the pool that we have. Now, as you can imagine, when we first started this process, uh the coaches hated it because they liked being in charge and in
17:19 control. They wanted to pick their players. But again, all the worst aspects of that came to light in the process. And so now most of these coaches have really over time have
17:29 learned to learn and accept it because it takes the burden off of them of having to have those difficult conversations. One of the best examples we have is fourth grade and the fifth
17:37 grade on the girl side. Uh head coach and two assistants when the scores came out for fifth grade, both of his assistants, their kids didn't make the
17:44 one team this year. They're on the two team. And it was appropriate because they were late developers. this change in field size really had an impact on
17:51 their ability to affect the play. And when we talked to that coach, he said, "Honestly, you're not wrong. That's where they'd be." Now, imagine if it was
17:58 the coach in charge of picking their teams. How many coaches do you know would turn to their assistant coaches and say, "Hey, both your kids aren't on
18:04 my team next year." I can probably guess with a good amount of certainty that that percentage is very close to zero, right? That kid, those kids wouldn't be
18:12 in the right spot and other kids wouldn't have the opportunity to move up and play with players closer to their ability. So again, we're really focused on getting kids in the right areas with
18:21 the right players around them with the right abilities and managing that expectation of, hey, it's not the worst thing that you drop down for a year because maybe you're a late bloomer and
18:29 the next year they come back and all of a sudden they're back on the one team because perhaps they had a late growth spurt. Perhaps they, you know, maybe
18:35 spent a year not really loving soccer for a little bit and all of a sudden they get back into it because kids are fickle, things happen, right? It's all
18:41 about what they show and their abilities and their desire to improve. That's what we reward through this process. And also it makes it easier to coach because now
18:49 your team the best to worse. It doesn't look like this on a graph. It's much flatter. So it's easier to run those coaching sessions where everybody is
18:55 within the same realm. And same in games. It takes away some of that sort of feeling of like, hey, I'm going to pull out my best player and the kid that
19:03 goes in is so far down the pecking order that my team's all of a sudden going to be much weaker. And then subconsciously a lot of times those kids end up with
19:10 not getting equal playing time. All those sorts of things. And kids notice.
19:13 they know when they're not being put in because they're so much worse than, you know, perhaps those best players when the team delta looks like this. So, it
19:20 really makes it easier for coaches to coach because their teams are much more homogeneous in terms of that process as they go onto the field. So, that's our
19:29 player centered process on tryyous. Again, it works for us and the situation we're in. It may not work for the situation you're in. It's not a panacea,
19:37 but I'm hoping that some of the information I give you can give you ways to make this more playercentered and less coach/parentered because in the end, what we're looking to do is
19:45 maximize the development of these kids so they can maximize their potential.
19:49 Most of our town programs, our goal is to get our kids to a love the game and b if they want to when they go to high
19:54 school be successful in that process, which is much more cutthroat, much more limiting. The cuts are real there.
20:00 There's no second chance. There's no in town option for them. So really, we're trying to maximize the development. so that they're the best possible players they can be when they get there. I hope
20:09 that you could take some uh positives out of this. I'd love to hear if you have some other ideas on how you make your triyouts more player centered and
20:14 less parent centered or coach centered.
20:17 Uh love to hear how other areas of the country and the world frankly do this sort of thing. Again, with volunteer coaches, not professional coaches. Big difference here. Um but other than that,
20:26 happy first day of summer. That's when I'm recording this. I hope you're all well and can enjoy some time with your family over the summer. So until next
20:33 time, hope to see you out in the fields.
