Insiders view of tryouts

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05/09/2024 12:22

Subject: Insiders view of tryouts

quote

Anonymous

I've been reading this forum for a while now, and thought you might be interested in the actual "inside the club" view of how tryouts work. From what I am reading and after almost 25 years of coaching in the area, there are some crazy opinions being stated as facts on different threads, so this is what my general experience has been. Obviously its broad and meant to be fairly generic across the area.
Say the night's tryouts end at about 8:00, and then the coaches get home and get on calls to go over the players. They may need to get on more than one if they were doing multiple age groups, and these can go for a bit as coaches advocate for one player or another or debate a certain one. They may be delayed a little while the lead coach reviews all the evaluations to do a preliminary ranking before the call. These may be zoom or conference calls or even text chats. In any case, they are the coaches getting together to compare notes after tryouts end.
Finally offers are set, and people stay up late to send them as the coaches tell them the names and team assignments. Clubs know you are anxious, and are anxious for you as well. If they are not there immediately after a tryout before you go to bed we know that you all wake up the next day and hope there is a message. That's why they stay up until midnight or later to get them to you.
Coaches are stressed over this process too. You may see them in huddles out there looking organized and relaxed but they are not, I promise you. They do not like to cut kids, and they don't like to disappoint players who have hoped for a team they won't make. This is the worst part of coaching by far. Watching disappointed kids is hard. We can see it when they are on a field they don't want to be on. We see the body language when you are laving with them. We get texts from players, or phone calls fro kids fighting back tears because they don't think they did well. It sucks to know your players are unhappy. We coach because we LIKE kids. We generally like their parents too.Coaches dread making those calls saying the player is moving down a team, even when it is the best place for them to grow and develop and get a lot of playing time. You'd be surprised how hard it is for coaches who know and like your child to pass along that news. They are happy to see new faces but they realize that a new face and a good player mean that a kid they know may lose out on a slot because of it. Their job is to build the best team they can, but it is not done without empathy for the players. Sometimes a player is in between teams, say the A and B teams. Parents start hearing about offers for both teams coming out, and stress because they don't have one yet. Sometimes not hearing yet is a good thing.
Hopefully wherever your players are trying out you are seeing a lot of coaches on the fields watching them. Some of them are tasked with a certain objective by the coaches in the age groups, something like look at these four players. I can only take two, tell me who performs best. This is ideally a coach who does not know them well and can give an unbiased opinion. Sometimes it is please look at all the new kids and disperse them by ability level to the fields with the players we already basically know and have initially started to get sorted out. If you're lucky, there is a goal keeper coach at one of your tryouts who is watching them. In any tryout, there will be players moving between fields. You may see each existing team start together, but you'll see players moving around.
I have been at multiple clubs and I can tell you that none of them have already determined entire teams before tryouts and closed and locked the door. Often the top players are sent early invitations. This lets those coaches know where the players stand as far as returning and gives them a sense of how many spots they want to fill. Second and third teams and so forth also know exactly who their top kids are, but making those offers early is more difficult because the first team has to get out together before the second team can, and so on. As I said some of the top players on a team below the top one may be more in limbo because the first team is waiting for acceptances and then they know who will get the next offer. This trickles down. Third teams may hear several days after the tryouts end for that group, and if there are fourth that could still be longer. It does not mean the clubs are not excited to work with your kids or don't want them or believe they can play. Don't read anything into it beyond the fact that the teams fill from the top down. There are players who ask for extra time to consider offers too, or families who are waiting to hear about another child before the accept because they are hoping to have them all in one place. That can slow things down too.
Last point. Sometimes at large sessions at larger clubs, a kid does not get a full evaluation done, or only one person has done it. There are lots of reasons, maybe they moved the coach to a different field before he finished, maybe they moved the player, maybe it was time for a water break, maybe the kid only made one tryout, maybe its a new coach and the old one is saying they need to see the player again because they were not "on" at the first session. This is why it helps to go to several tryouts if it is a club you like. Getting asked back, or finding out another tryout has been added both indicate there are kids the club really likes and are trying to place correctly, not that it is disorganized. High school teams go a week with tryouts, the NFL literally months. Soccer clubs have about three hours to look at an age group. There are usually quite a few kids between teams and getting placement right is the whole point here. Sometimes it may mean the age group needs players, but usually it means they are looking at your kids and want to get an extra look before making an offer to be sure it is to the correct team.
We all know it is stressful and most of us remember going through tryouts ourselves, so we get it. I hope this helps.