Your Ideal Tryout format

If its utopia, then I would not have to cut anyone

 

F -it. Just give me 12-14 players who all show up to practice and all want to play. We'll figure something out after that.

 

One of the dilemas I've faced is lets say you have to choose between 1 of these 2 players.
Player A - Fairly new to soccer. Incredible athlete, big and blazing fast. Faster than anyone else on team. Aggressive to the ball. Very little soccer skill, poor to no kicking technique, no experience and is clueless on pitch. Doesn't even know how to stay onsides yet.
Player B - been playing for many years, takes soccer seriously, goes to camps and clinics in offseason, not the best athlete, slow and uncoordinated. Great communicator on field and knows how to make shape on pitch and work with other teammates.

Who do you choose. The raw talent newbie or the not so coordinated long-time player?

 

One of the best tryout evaluation drills is to do the 1v1 on goal. Kick a ball out to the 18 for one player to settle and attack the goal with a player running out from the side of the goal. You'll see defensive technique/agressiveness from the defender and footskill, coordination, speed, striking ability from the offensive player. You really can find out alot from players from that 1 simple drill.

SSG's and full games are also critical evaluation tools. Some kids are gamers and you need to see how they deal with in-game situations and you really don't find that out in drills. I'm sure going into tryouts, you already know several whom are automatic on the team, some who have no chance and a few in the middle that you are really evaluating. Get that middle group into 1 field of SSG and really look at them closely.

 

For me it's Player B, and it's not close. In my experience (which is admittedly brief), too many clubs choose Player A and their team is full of that type of player. This leads those teams to be stereotypical "boot-ball" culprits. In my team, a player like that will simply disrupt the type of soccer that I try to teach. No matter how coachable Player A is, he will rely far too much on his athleticism to fit into my style of play, and that becomes a crutch. I try very hard to never sacrifice a "soccer player" in favor of an "athlete". And in any case, I know that there is another club out there who will give Player A a roster spot, so I don't feel as though I'm driving a player from the sport. I would much rather take Player B and build on his foundations.

 

I agree with this. I tend to start out with "smaller" activities (similar to the one you mentioned) to find skill and technique, but I devote at least half (and sometimes more) of my tryout to match-like activities. I like to do a round of 3v3 or 4v4 and then a full-sided game (with however many kids there are) so that I can get a better feel for players' intelligence. As mentioned in my post above, I don't really worry about figuring out how athletic a kid is – I'm more concerned with their first touch and their decision-making skills (and how coachable they seem).

 

Who you select depends on what your goals are. Are you trying to build a winning team or develop the best players? If you select a good athlete with no fundamental skills for an advanced team you need to consider the training problem you are creating for yourself by mixing novices with advanced players.

If you are not going to be able to provide suitable training for the novice, you are not going to be doing him any favors by taking him. That player would be much better off training where the focus is on fundamentals for a year to gain some skills before moving up to an advanced team.

Depending on your club situation, you might be able to have a novice player practice with a team focused on fundamentals or there may be Coerver sessions available, in addition to playing matches with your team. You just have to be careful about overtraining.

 

For me, we don't have tryouts. We went to an academy format a few years ago. We take all. A trainer for an age group will eventually after 10-15 practices make teams (and make them only because we HAVE to in order to play in the local league. You are required to be rostered to only one team). We would prefer to have a fluid roster that allows kids to move up and down levels.

 

Whatever drills or SSGs are used, I wish our club would use a DOC or even a whole group of staff coaches from another club (the farther away they are from the better) to do the evaluations and set the teams.

 

Three day tryouts.

Have other coaches with me who take it seriously and not interested in shooting the breeze with each other while tryouts are going out.

Small sided play in a small space want to see pass and move and not just passing.

Make coaching points then see if they actually use those coaching points.

Then play attacker v defenders on a half field.

Then play full sided play through all of this make coaching points.

I want to see them push themselves at tryouts.

Then have other coaches who do teams at our age group to give the players other options if we can't use them.

I try to make judgements on players right after the last tryout days.

I look for player vision, quickness in a small space, not losing the ball under defensive pressure, brains if yor smart you don't have to be super bast, fast step speed is a big deal for me. Player will is also a big deal.

 

Although it is not the OP's original question, like cleansheets, I do not have tryouts. Never had, and I hope never to have to. I cannot cut anyone. It's no fun and there's no way I can look an 8, 10 or 12 year old in the eye and tell them they weren't good enough. Not going to do it...

So. My travel teams have been by invitation only and I do a lot of scouting to ensure I have a good list of players to invite. I will talk to coaches to get their impressions of players, and I ask parents for recommendations of who I should be looking at.

As far as the athlete - player dichotomy posed by Rob55, well it depends on who I have on the team. You need both. I am willing to work with a pure athlete and take the time to teach her (I pretty much only coach girls anymore). If I already have some athletes, and one who likes to play defense esp, then you go with a player with good technique and a soccer brain on her shoulders. If my team looks like it will have plenty of ball players, then I would choose the athlete. For me, in a small rural area, it is a moot point. On my last team of U12 girls, I had three prime athletes (one of whom was just a darn fine player anyway) and I had three girls with good to very good ball skills when they started out. And then I had seven girls who were middling. I would have been able to take both players in that scenario and ease out of one the lesser player-lesser athletic players.

And I might have made the worst choice. Over the past three seasons, my best soccer brain has been one of these middling players. She's not athletic at all, and while she has become my coerver-like ballskills star, she doesn't have enough of a burst to gain space when she makes a turn. I am anxiously awaiting, more than I ever have, our move to 11v11 because I finally have a position for her, withdrawn AM. She has a nose for goal, but in a small sided 3-3-1, she's lost up front because she needs another forward to drag the other defenders back towards goal and then she can find the space behind them. I think she's going to be great, but she is one of the players I would have cut if I'd had more original "talent".

 

No one likes to cut players. Where are you getting the kids your inviting to your tryouts. It is not from other travels clubs is it? Are you inviting them while there season is still going on? How exactly are you doing it and not have an ethics problem.

 

We don't have enough travel clubs around here. I start with rec players and create the team from scratch. Seems to be what I am good at: taking a group of young girls, teach them their first dribbling moves, how to close down on the ball, elevate a starting keeper, and begin with heads-up passing and shooting. Then someone more ambitious feels that I'm not teaching the girls to win organizes them into a more competitive, farther away league and they go on to pretty good success. So, I'm all about building the base.

 

I had a friend of mine in baseball he spent years in the minors league. Started a club the Brooklyn D's. No tryouts it was all about learning the game. He lost most of his players to clubs that were only about winning. It never Bothered him. He just got more players and did the same thing.

 

I used to think that telling an 11-year-old girl she didn't make the team was the most difficult thing in the world. Then I discovered that telling an 11-year-old girl's mother is the most difficult thing in the world.

I don't like cutting kids either. Our club tries to find a team for every player who tries out. But when you've made two full squads and have 8 players left, (or only have 10 try out) what do you do? You can have 22 players on a team (not good), or spend all your time trying to recruit more so you can have 11 on game day and squeak by (not good for other reasons). We see if we can play kids up, if there's a team that can use them, we shuffle, we try to give everyone a spot. But there's a minimum number of players you need for a viable team, and you can't always get that, unfortunately.

 

In truth unless your doing a brand new team your are only looking for players to round off your team. So the try out is to fill only 4 or 5 new players at the most.

You don't have to have an open try out for that. My old club everyone with the club players, coaches, parents of the players, and other soccer people are always looking for players for those new players that they think will be a good fit for all the teams on the club. Plus word of mouth was always good for being on the club so parents and players want to play for the club.

So guys like me would scout those players. I would watch them play and if I liked them. I would invite them to try out with our teams in their age group before the new season starts. If I like them the chances were very good their coaches would like them as well.

 

Assuming a "full squad" is 18: top team 14 players, next team 15 players, last team 15 players.

If only 10 try out it's pretty simple too, you're not cutting anyone because there's no team to cut them from. Either that or find a few more.

Our club seems to make it work - we don't cut. Sometimes we have to over roster and not have every kid dress for every game, sometimes we have teams that have few or no subs and they frequently use call ups. Neither of these approaches is ideal but it is better, IMHO, than cuts.

 

Not sure I agree, but that's a difference in philosophy. We don't over-roster teams because we want kids to play, not sit on the bench. This is at the competitive/travel level--what kid is going to enjoy being told they won't play and have to sit at home while the rest of the team does off to a game? Especially when they put in the time at practice and paid the same amount as everyone else? I can't do that to a kid or a family. Running an under-staffed team is a bit better (I've had teams with 13 on the roster for 11v11), but how much fun is it to constantly have to play short-handed? And what happens if those player have to miss a game, or a few get injured? Now the whole team is in jeopardy. We can try to recruit warm bodies from the rec population, and I have, but those kids didn't try out in the first place for various reasons that haven't changed. If it's the only team or bottom team, there is no place to call-up from.

So, I'd rather make a few tough cuts, and try to help those kids at least find a team elsewhere on the rec side of our system. The kids can still play, just maybe not at the level they were hoping to. And if you have tryouts in the first place, that's simply the way it works.

Given your club's stance, I'm curious what kind of feedback you get from parents/players about over- or under-rostered teams. IMO we would likely lose kids off those squads pretty quickly to other clubs or rec ball.

 

I suspect that alot of the differences in approach are based on the local circumstances. In my county there are 35,000 kids playing soccer. Lot's of opportunities. Where I grew up there was no organized soccer at all. Val1 is coaching in an area where clubs opportunities are limited. Threeputzzz's club has three teams in the same age group.

 

Wow. My county's total population is 38,000 and we have 650 kids playing club ball...

 

We typically play 10-12 league games as season. Coaches I have talked about this with usually have no problem making the schedule work so 1-2 kids don't dress for each game (usually they don't sit on the bench either - they just have other things going on). Over rostered teams usually enter 2-3 tournaments a year to create more game opportunities.

Having a short team can be made to work as well, put it can be a real pain in the backside too. We call up from the next age level down. My current U11 team has had at least one rec or U10 player in most of our games so far this year.

Again I don't agree, cuts should be the last resort. I shouldn't have said our club does not cut - we do everything we can to avoid having to cut but you could construct a numbers scenario where we would have no choice. When I say cuts I don't mean a kid has to play on a lower level team, that happens all the time. I'm talking about having no team for them at all.

Players on upper level teams don't like over roster situations. Some parents are basicly never happy. We frequently lose players that don't make top level teams to other clubs.

I think RCA is right the approach is based on the size of the club and may not work for smaller clubs. We have well over 1000 travel players each year. At the lower age groups it's common to have 6 or more teams. There are 10 U9 girls teams this season.

 

We play a similar number of games, but I'd still be very reluctant to over-roster.

We're more in line than you think. We try to find a spot for every kid who tries out as well. Our clubs are similar in size, with 5-6 teams each in the lower age groups. If we fill out our teams, and have some odd number left over, we will try to bump roster sizes a bit, allow kids to play up where we may be short, recruit more players to fill out a squad, etc. The only thing we don't do, and will have to agree to disagree on, is over-rostering. I don't think that's fair to do to someone.