[SoccerAddict]

Do any coaches provide feedback to their players in the form of report cards or written evaluations? I'm thinking of doing this for the U13 boys team that I coach. Does anyone have an Excel or Word template that they use?

Thanks in advance.

[Richie]

I am not a believer in giving written evaluations to the player and the parent. I would mention maybe two things that I think is a good idea for an individual player to work on.

I do believe in fully evaluating a player at the end of the season, but it is not for the players eyes its for my eyes and another coach he might be getting next season.

Why you ask?

The below post was written by Bruce brownlee took it off his site. He left out a lot of additional things.

His post was originally written on the coaches list after a discussion I had with him on the pitfalls of giving player evaluations to the player.

"I have made a variety of serious mistakes with written evaluations. The results have been tragic, entertaining, sorrowful, and amusing. I list a few possible evaluation mistake strategies here. Maybe you can make some new and more innovative mistakes instead of the ones I've already enjoyed, or combine a couple of these tried and true evaluation process mistakes to create novel results that will provide you, your team manager, and your club president with some interesting experiences, depending on who fields the phone calls first.

Make the level of detail too great. Build a beautiful and detailed set of tables in word processing format. The evaluation should be at least 8 pages long. Completing it in detail for each player should take at least an hour, and at least an hour or more to explain to the player and parent.


Base large parts of the evaluation on lengthy skills testing. Completing this testing in an objective way over a comprehensive set of skills for just one group of players, like 5 or 6 kids, can take 3 or 4 training sessions. This should far exceeds the time available. Without dozens of volunteers with clipboards, only one or a few players are participating at any moment, so this particular activity prevents meaningful team training. If you prefer to use parents with clipboards, then you can introduce the suspicion of favoritism, as one player got a higher rating out of mom or dad than any other player did.


Don't prepare the parents and players to receive the evaluation. You can generate more angry or unsettlingly hostile phone calls by writing an honest and detailed evaluation that spells out clearly flaws to be corrected, and then send it out cold without letting parents and players know, about 6 times in advance, what purpose the evaluation serves and how it should be used. Make sure it looks like a report card, not a player development plan. Unprepared parents will interpret the list of problems to be fixed as a detailed failure record that the coach is documenting prior to letting the player go from the team at the next tryout.


Send out the evaluations at a bad time. As long as you don't prepare the parents to receive and to work with you on improvements noted in a written evaluation, you might as well enhance the effect and send out a written evaluation just before the state cup final or a major travel tournament to improve the team's chances of falling apart under pressure.


Send out the evaluation as a list of player goals, but at the end of the year just before tryouts. This helps ensure that the players will have only time to worry about any weaknesses, not to correct them during the training year, and will help increase their anxiety and sense of hopelessness over tryouts.


Deliver part of the evaluations late. Try to do some of the evaluations early and deliver them, and then let work and other issues prevent you from completing and delivering the rest until much later. This helps generate fear and suspicion.


Rate players inconsistently. Try to start with one standard in mind, and then change your standard during the course of writing the evaluations. If you are able to send out some of the evaluations as soon as you complete them, you will be able to avoid correcting the early evaluations to make them consistent with the later ones.


Bring up weaknesses discussed in confidence with the player earlier in front of the player and the team later. This ensures that the player will hate you and will help prevent the player from ever bother you again with trust and respect.


Imply that tryouts are strongly linked to evaluation results. Why not make the tryout anxiety experience a year-long torture by connecting tryouts and evaluations with repeated evaluations.


Use a lot of jargon and coach talk in your evaluation to help make it unclear what has to be corrected and how this could be accomplished. Avoid following up with the player and parents to prevent a workable training plan might correct playing problems from being created. If there is a corrective plan, be sure to avoid following up on the plan, so that the potential benefit of a written evaluation becomes just one more unfulfilled promise to the team and the player."


You see?

Richie

[fernb8]

I agree with richie. You are really looking for trouble by writing evaluations. The players really arent the problem, it is the parents. Ask any teacher about parent/teacher conferences with parents who arent happy about thier kids report cards.

[CUS]

I have a brief discussion with the kids (now U12) just before the season and ask what their goals are for the upcoming season. It can be something like 'Learn to shoot with my left foot' or 'learn to head the ball better'.

Remember KISS.

Keep It Simple, Stupid.

[firstshirt]

be very very careful when giving evals.....it can and will come back and bite you in the you know what! As a JV coach I would pull each kid aside at the end of the year and tell him what i thought he needed to do to improve for next year or what he needed to do to be considered for varsity. Most kids understand where you are comming from,,,but a few only hear it as negative comments. I had a kid who as a freshman was all of about 4'11. Fast as heck, great footskills, mean as heck, great attitude, great vision, but could get knocked off the ball by a flea. I told him that if every kid on the team had his determination and grit, we would have been undefeated,,,,gave him a few more compliments and told him his only hold back was his size and that was something that nature had to take care of,,,suggested a workout program for his upperbody. well a few days go by and the AD calls me in to the office and asked what the heck did i tell this kid,,,,,come to find out he told his mom that i said he would not make varsity because he was too small! Never once did i imply his size would keep him off varsity. I asked his mom if that was all he said and she said yes.....needless to say, mom, me and the kid had a nice long talk abou the importance of telling the whole story.

[Richie]

Firstshirt I was going to suggest to work with him on shiedling the ball, and have the opponents push him around while doing it, but after that incident.

I would not worry about his playing time too much after that. Evidently, he doesn't pay attention to coaching points.

How forgiving is your nature? Then you can decide if you want to help him improve his game or not.

That incident would annoy me.

Richie

[carney]

While they can be tricky, I think evaluations are essential. People here talk about giving evaluations at the end of the year, but the fact is that the amount of practicing a kid does in the off season is miniscule compared to the amount of practicing they do in season. That is where the vast majority of their improvement takes place. How can they correct their weaknesses in practice if they don't know what they are? Sure you have to be careful about the way you tell them, but if you don't tell them you're doing them a disservice.

Of course, if you've got a kid whose 4'11 there's just not much to say. I've got a 4'11 freshman this year as well and we can give him all the feedback in the world, and he could practice day and night. He still can't change the fact that he's tiny.

[Richie]

"but the fact is that the amount of practicing a kid does in the off season is miniscule compared to the amount of practicing they do in season"

A lot depends on how self motivated the player is, and how far he wants to go in the game.

[IASocFan]

Just remember that Beasley, Donovan, and Maradona are all too small to play this physical game. If you're small, you just have to compensate by being quicker, smarter, and more skilled.

[CharlesS]

How tall is Leon Knight?