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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote] I think I know how averages work, but since you brought up stats, we can go more in depth. You definitely have a distributions of skills and abilities in any team and nobody disputes that. You can do the stats for each player and come up with solid numbers of who is at the top, who is average, and who is below the average. You can even point out to a p-value that makes this one player unfit to make it on the court, so you have a good reason to bench her. But there is a bigger issue here: why didn't the club realize that during the tryouts? Why did the club make an offer to this player if her skills and abilities are so poor compared to the rest of the team? Most players new to a club have no idea what team they are going to end up on until they see their teammates at practice. How would they know that they are at the bottom with p-values that give them no chance to see the court? [/quote]

Presumably you know how crazy tryouts for club usually are every year, given that you're commenting on this forum. There are also any number of reasons for that. Sometimes a player has a really strong showing at tryouts that it turns out is out of character for their usual performance. Sometimes they don't get the best evaluation because they have more than 100 girls to sift through. Sometimes the club wants each roster to have a certain number of players (typically 12), and depending on the age/location of the club and their tryouts, they might have to work pretty far down the waitlist because players took other offers and the coaches had to scramble. I have mostly coached 14s and 15s in my club career, and three different years have not been able to fill out my roster until the "everybody is a free agent" portion of the tryout window, simply because that's how much movement there is in that age range in general (the most popular years to try club) and my area in particular. As I said earlier, I personally DO attempt to play everyone in every pool play match, but playing time expectations are also something I lay out before our first practice (as every coach should). Still, I can imagine a lot of variables from tryouts, practices, and tournaments that could definitely affect an athlete's court time depending on the coach, and the OP never really shared anything that would eliminate even some of the more obvious options.[/quote]

So you want people to believe that a player can have such a strong showing at tryouts that she can fool the coaches, but then she is so bad when the season starts that she needs to be benched. And that sounds totally reasonable to you and in no way you are trying to shift the blame from the poor club decisions during tryouts. [/quote]

Not the PP, who honestly sounds like they were just trying to help.

The scenario you describe happens at every club and at every level of competition (not just developmental).  Its common at the younger ages and up through U15 or so, less common at U16+.  The younger the team and the more developmental the team is, the bigger the risk is for both the club and the family that a player that everyone hoped would be good ends up not as good.

If a club's only exposure to a player is at tryouts it is entirely possible the scenario you describe can occur and it happens more often than you would think. A less-skilled player can have a good day at tryouts and make a team or a very good player can have a bad day of tryouts and not make a team. It takes coaches with a lot of experience to identify good players having an off day and vice-versa on the basis of just a few minutes watching them over the course of a 90 minute tryout. And if a club is running multiple tryout times for the same age its even easier to get a "false positive" or a "false negative." That's one of the reasons everyone on these threads recommends attending at least one if not more of the fall clinics that most of the good clubs run (and every club that has teams in the top level of CHRVA). They help both the club and you figure out if your DD is right fort the club.

Is it a poor decision by the club to put a "bad" player onto a team above their level? It depends.  On a developmental team clubs will often look for less skilled players that show either the physical traits necessary to compete and/or the ability to learn quickly. The physical traits are obvious in a tryout while the ability to learn is one of the hardest things to ascertain. There are [b]lots[/b] of physically gifted players who make developmental teams and then struggle to become good volleyball players. And the physical gifts aren't just height, but quickness, arm swing speed, etc.  Show up at tryouts and be tall for your age, or faster than the other players or show you can hit a ball hard and you have a good chance of making a team.

Then you get into practice and the coach discovers that while you can hit a ball hard, your footwork and timing are off and you are struggling to get better.  Or you can get to the spot of a serve because you are quick but can't get your platform right to pass well.  Or you are tall and can block when you get in front of the ball, but struggle to read the set and never get to the proper block location.

The best coaches in the region are very good at finding talent and developing it.  But there aren't that many of those coaches and it takes years for them to develop both the eye for a future good player and the ability to train them up to their potential. Every coach has a story of the player who they thought would be great but they just couldn't get them to up to the level of the team.

Its terrible that it sounds like its happened to you this year. But it doesn't automatically mean the club was acting in bad faith or trying to "rob" you.[/quote]

It looks like you haven't been reading, so I will mention again that my DD has her court time and this is not about me or my family. So let's avoid the appeal to motive fallacy as we move on into this conversation.

I can see how the less experienced coaches may make a mistake thinking that a player is better than she actually is. I assume that these circumstances are relatively rare on the top teams and they happen most often on the bottom teams. The reason why the coach makes a mistake  (whether they misjudge the skills or they hope the player would develop at a faster rate) is quite irrelevant. You have an offer that has been made and a family that pours money into a club. The family has no idea who else is on the team and cannot foresee that the player would be benched for the season. Why would that family pay the price for the coach's decision to extend an offer? I can see you explaining away poor decision by the coach / club and only "sucks to be you" for the family. [/quote]

If someone’s kid gets benched, that’s not “the family paying for the coach’s mistake.” That’s competition. The offer gets a roster spot, not immunity from someone else working harder or improving faster.

The only “poor decision” here is everyone who signed up for a competitive sport and acting shocked when it’s… competitive.[/quote]

I would agree with this idea if we were talking about the top 25% of the teams. You can consider those competitive for a good reason. But the teams that lose most of the games anyway are hardly competitive. Refusing to develop the players by offering the chance to play in tournaments is not acceptable. Especially when families have ABSOLUTELY NO WAY OF KNOWING that their kids would end up being benched. Before the contract is signed, the only person who knows that specific kids would end up on the bench is the coach (or the club director). So stop blaming the people without access to the information. [/quote]

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