Steal My Tryout Evaluation Plan (For High School Coaches)

Looking to streamline your tryouts and avoid stress? Steal my exact evaluation plan and learn how to make better decisions faster during tryouts! Grab more coaching tips here → https://coachfreetraining.com
 
Coaches, I know tryouts can be tough and overwhelming, especially when it comes to making the right decisions for your team. In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on my two-day tryout evaluation process. From summer training to setting clear expectations and assessing skills, I’m sharing the exact strategies that have helped me build strong, mentally tough teams. These tried-and-true methods will ensure your athletes are evaluated fairly and effectively, making your decisions easier and more transparent.
 
🎯 You’ll Learn:
 ✔️ Why evaluating in the summer helps set the stage for tryouts
 ✔️ How to set clear expectations with athletes and parents
 ✔️ The power of data in your tryout evaluation (and why it matters)
 ✔️ How to evaluate intangibles like leadership and mental toughness
 ✔️ Why creating pressure situations at tryouts builds better players
 
🎙 I’m Coach Bre – a mental performance coach for girl athletes, Co-Founder of The Elite Competitor, and a longtime head volleyball coach with 4 state championships. With over 14 years of experience, I’ve learned that tryouts aren’t just about athletic ability – they’re about finding the right fit for your team.
 
KEY MOMENTS:
 00:00 – Why Most Tryouts Go Wrong (And How to Fix It Early)
 03:01 – Your Tryout Blueprint: Structure, Flow, and Timing That Works
 04:15 – What You Should Be Evaluating First (Hint: Not Just Skills)
 05:39 – Day 1: How to Assess Skills Effectively
 06:22 – Day 2: Position-Specific Evaluations
 07:57 – Wrap-Up: Final Thoughts + Free Tools to Improve Your Tryout Process
 
📢 COACHES – What’s your top tip for running smooth tryouts? Drop your experience in the comments. Let’s support each other. 👇
 
📌 Want to coach the mental game with confidence?
🔹 Grab our FREE training for coaches → https://coachfreetraining.com
🔹 Learn more about Plug & Play Elite Mental Game → 
https://elitecompetitor.com/plugplayemg 
🔹 Follow us on IG → @elitecompetitorcoach

Head to coachfreetraining.com to grab our free training for coaches to quickly level-up your team's mental game!

Transcript

1:04

Tryouts might be the most difficult and annoying part of coaching, and I'm actually about to go into tryouts in about three weeks, so I thought I'd take you behind the scenes of how I do tryouts, what my process is, so that you can steal it and make tryouts less stressful. For you, and if I haven't met you, I'm Coach Bree. I am a mental performance coach for girl athletes. I'm also a 14 year head volleyball coach. I've led my team to four state championships, so I have done a lot of tryouts. I've, I've ran a lot of tryouts. Um, been a part of a lot of tryouts. Had to make difficult decisions. Decisions that. I sometimes regret, and I want you to be able to have the resources to not do the same thing, take the good and don't make the same mistakes that I did over the years. So let's get into it. I'm just gonna take you through what I've been doing and what I'll be doing as a part of my tryout evaluation. I coach volleyball, by the way, but this applies to all sports. So our tryout evaluation actually. Starts right now. So if you're a high school coach, you probably in your off season are having your kids, you know, do some sort of off season training or workouts. For us, we actually train quite a bit in the summer. We train three days a week for like three hours. We do a combination of weight training. We also play, so this is actually where I get to like see athletes over a long period of time. Like our summer I think is like eight or nine weeks. I get to see them play, I get to see them interact with each other. I get to see their leadership skills. So. I tell athletes, I'm actually very clear with them, yes, the evaluation happens at like the official evaluation happens at tryouts, but you're being evaluated right now in summer because I get to see you so much and that actually helps form some decisions. So it's not official, but I am in my head evaluating, kind of piecing together what teams could look like and you know, you just get a lot of time with your teams. We also do camp and, and all of that. And I could just see like how they respond to feedback, how they respond to mistakes, how they interact with each other. So. And that just kind of happens all throughout summer. The other really important thing I do in the summer is I talk about my tryout process. I make sure the expectations are clearly laid out so that everybody is on the same page, including parents as we head into, um, tryout. So at the end of my emails, I send out an email almost every week in the season. I put on there a tryout, FAQ document. So it's been on there since like. May, and it has all the FAQs that you could think of for tryouts, including like making sure that you're cleared and eligible to participate, how we make decisions. I put my rubric on there, on what I'm evaluating for each position. I talk about how many teams we pick, how many athletes per team there are. Everything on there so that it's like already out there and it's communicated. And part of that is like I need to know as a coach what the answers to some of those questions are as far as like how many people can be on the team, um, can seniors be on varsity or not? Uh, if they made a team in the past, are they guaranteed to make that team? Again, like all of those things you've gotta know ahead of time. I just throw all that into the FAQ document so that like people are just kind of knowing what's expected of them before they go into tryouts. Okay. When I actually get into tryouts, we have two days, two day evaluation. We're in, we're out, we're done. Okay? Now that might not work for you, but I don't like to spend a whole lot of time in my season doing tryouts because my season has started and so I wanna get it done and I wanna form teams and I wanna get going because we have a game like in 10 days or something like that. So two days. Four hours a day. Um, I know that's kind of a lot, but I don't know. Or maybe not. Maybe you do more than that. I though don't have like huge numbers at tryouts, so I have about 60 that come out for 36 spots that I have. So I do have to make tough, tough decisions. But I know some of, you're dealing with like hundreds of people at your tryout, so it is a little different. Everyone that comes in, we give them a little name tag so that we know who they are. Super big. I also used to, I don't do this as much because I actually see so many of my players in the summer, so I know them already, but when I was newer and I didn't know players, I used to like take their picture and so that I could like. It actually like print it off and like make sure that I knew like who they were as I was making decisions later with my coaches and we're like, who was that girl who, you know? And it's easy to have a picture. So I used to do that. I don't do it anymore, but you know, they check in. I have them put like what position they've played before, if they're, if they're trying out for a certain position. But you don't have to do that. It's sometimes helpful. It's also though, sometimes I'm like, I'm just gonna evaluate you and put you where you should be. But as they come in for day one, I talk about what I'm looking for in each position. I have it narrowed down to like two or three. Almost like a job description. For each position that I have, I talk about what I'm looking for as far as like even on varsity, if I have seven returners, those seven are guaranteed pretty much to be on Mercy again. So I have five open spots and I'm looking for, you know, certain positions in those five spots. So it's very clear what I'm looking for. We play a lot of the sport at tryouts, and I know that might sound silly, but I used to do tryouts where we'd like run the mile, do vertical testing. I do not do any fitness testing because I am looking more for who can play the sport and play the position there. It's gonna be pretty obvious what their fitness is when they see them playing. Now there is a place for it if you're trying to like weed people out, I suppose. If them running the mile is your way of like assessing some of the work ethic on your team. Then there's that. I do see there's, there might be value in that, but I don't wanna waste any time doing fitness testing when I'm really looking at like who can play and who can play the position. Well, I want to see them playing the sport. So not to say you shouldn't ever do fitness testing or things like that, but I wouldn't dedicate a whole lot of time to it. I'm like, I'm not gonna measure your vertical'cause I can see, can you jump high and hit hard. You know, like your vertical isn't gonna like, make a huge difference for me. So maybe it's different in your gym, but that's, that's how I go because I really wanna see them playing the sport. Okay. So day one we evaluate also all the skills. So we rotate through. I like having extra hands, so I like, you know, have returning players come back or have volunteers who are facilitating drills so that I can evaluate. I've got my evaluation criteria, so I have all of the skills that I am evaluating. I rank them on a scale of one to four. You've gotta have data. It's annoying sometimes, but like in our school, like we have to have data to back up our decisions. So have some sort of concrete data. I know sometimes you're like, ah, I don't know what to put here, but like, just do your best so that you have some sort of evaluation, especially if you have to make tough, tough decisions or those cuts. Okay. Sometimes I make cuts after day one so that we can kind of. Thin the herd and focus more on day two. Like who? Who is there? Day two, we get more position based. We put them in high pressure situations to see how they respond. Still a ton of gameplay. That's gonna be the most important evaluation criteria for me is like. How are they playing? I like to also do little small sided games where I'm grouping players and giving them scores and they're, you know, they're getting evaluated that way. But I'm really looking at like, okay, who is standing out also with the intangibles, right? So things like their leadership, their communication, their mental game. So how are they responding to mistakes? How are they dealing with those pressure situations? All of those are things that I like to evaluate and look at, but I also know that. I train those things once the season starts. So the mental game is while important to evaluate a little bit for me. We incorporate so much of it into our season. We train it about 20 minutes a week, once a week, which actually isn't like a whole lot of time, but it makes a big difference. So I know that like, yeah, they might not be the best at maybe recovering after a mistake, but. I know I'm gonna be training that. So can they take care of the ball? Can they, you know, like how are all these other things that I'm evaluating? And so yes, I do evaluate the intangibles, especially leadership. How are they as a teammate? How is their attitude? But I also know that I'm gonna be training the mental game in them as the season starts, and that's also going to help them become even better. So if I can see some potential there, knowing that like I'm gonna help them, you know, and give them a skill to come back from a mistake faster and deal with pressure. Like, you know, if they're mentally tough and that's what I'm developing in them in the season, then you know, then I'm, I'm feeling pretty confident about my decision. So if you wanna learn the really easy things that I do in my season to train the mental side of the game so that you don't have to like. Just count a player out if they aren't quote unquote mentally tough at tryouts, and then go to coach free training.com. That's where I break everything down. I talk about the top three skills that I train every single week in practice to create mentally tough teams, and then I talk about my plug and play elite mental game system. That makes it really easy for you as a coach to do the same thing, even if you don't have a ton of time or if you're not a sports psychologist, because you don't need to be to teach these skills. In fact, you don't even need to teach them. You let me teach them. You just plug. Play lead a little short discussion and they've got the skills. That's at coach free training.com. Alright, that is the quick rundown of tryouts. Start in the summer. Start really with your expectations. Make sure you have an evaluation. List out all your roles on your team and what you're looking for. Make sure you have them listed out. I have a little like. You know, sheet where I am, I have their names. I have, on a scale of one to four, how are they demonstrating these things? Use that to be your guide, but also don't be afraid to go with some of this, you know, gut, gut feeling as well, and what you know as a coach your program needs. All right, coaches. Good luck with tryouts. Comment below what your tryout best practices are because I wanna learn from you as well, and I'll see you in the next episode.