We just completed our evaluation of each player on our U12G travel team. Some of the results were amazing. One player in particular had been doing a really good job at left back of not letting players beat her on offense. Problem was she also would not take the ball and go up field once beating the offensive player. She would always clear the ball which meant part of the time the ball came back at us.
We played a tournament the end of November and really wanted to win this particular tournament. First game same result with this player. We had 3 hours to our next game. Sat down with the player and parent to discuss what she does good, needs improvement on, etc. We evaluated skills, techniques, mental, physical, psychological, respect for coaches/trainer, respect for the team, and respect for parents. We rated 3 to 9 items under each category. Then we had an overall synopsis of her performance in all areas on the team and what she could do to enhance her performance to help the team and herself.
We told her how she requests to play offense and shows us she can do it in practice but not games. Show us from the defense and we will get you up front. She played her best ever in our next game and we were so proud of her. She played forward the 2nd half.
The same player kept asking to play in goal for 2 seasons and was so bad in goal we did not dare to respect her wishes. She even whiffed several punts in a tournament the first game of our 2nd season. We kept working with her in goal in practice but did not see enough improvement to play her in goal. We had semi-private keeper training this past summer and a verbal evaluation of what we needed to see if she were to be in goal. She is now one of the best U12G keepers around. Part of it was her coordination catching up with her size, tall and lanky.
Every kid and parent expressed sincere thanks for this written evaluation. We were warned not to use points so it would not resemble a report card. We rated them 10 highest and 1 lowest anyway and they loved it. We compared them to the best nationally (50 plus years in soccer) and then against other players on our team.
We do not keep statistics on goals allowed, goals scored,passes, etc. We feel as a team they are all responsible for those items. More important to us is their individual willingness to try in games what we teach at practice, including attitude-mental-psychological-etc. We continually talk about and allow them to fail their way to success.
We are very happy with the evaluation results and of course will refine it as we go along. How will they know where to improve if you do not do something similar to our process. Do not assume they know where they need improvement or will magically find their game.
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