Tryouts and Evaluations

I don't have tryouts.

I used to have tryouts, and sometimes I miss the good old days. You line up a bunch of nervous kids around the middle, detailing your expectations for the season and at tryouts. Then you do some technical drills to test skills, space them out with a lot of high energy conditioning to see who will tough it out and then let the kid compete at some point to see if you missed anything in drills. After a few nights of this have  a meeting or post a list of who survived and earned the right to make the team. I don't do that anymore.

Now we have evaluation camp. Over a period of 10 -12 practice sessions we put in our entire offense. Anything we will plan on doing that year we work on, we mix this with skill drills that work on pieces of the offense and transition/competitive drills to keep energy high. During this time we do three levels of evaluation:
- Team Player
- Off Court Player
-Program

At the end of the sessions we announce teams for that year. Then we spend more time on individual skill development and defense.

Team Player and Off Court Player

This is an assesment of the players we have in terms of desirable basketball and program traits. We examine the following traits in every player and each coach ranks them out of 4:

-Atheticism (Agility, Verticality, Flexibility)
- Speed/Quickness
-Offensive Skills
-Defensive Skills
-Rebounding
- Leadership
- Hustle
-Intelligence (Decision Making, Application of Concepts, Ability to Adjust)
- Focus
- Complication Free (Drama, Laziness, Attitude)
- Size (Height, Length, Wing Span, Strength)
- Experience (Level of competition previous, Programs involved with, Camp/Club experience)

This takes several days or even weeks to determine, as we need time to see players in various settings. We need to talk to teachers, former coaches and other persons of influence in their lives to make all these determinations. In the end coaches will agree on a total score for each player.

Program

Once the numbers are set for each player the coaches will rank them from 1-x based on the numbers. We then decide who will make what team.

In our high school setting we generally follow this pattern:

- Best 8-10 kids based soley on the rankings make varsity.  Then we fill in remaining roster spots (depending on team size) with any remaining grade 11-12's on the list from highest rank to lowest.

- Any left over 11 and 12's are met with and given opportunities to be involved with the program in other ways (managers, officials, work with minor program) etc.

- We now take the best remaining 9/10's to make up the JV team until the roster is filled. Any leftover players are given the same options as left over 11's and 12's.

In the time we've begun doing this we've been more successful at weeding kids out on their own and over timethen we had in shortened time frames of the past. Players who are able have a chance to show over time, and deficiencies become apparrent on and off the court after a few weeks, making decisions easier.