Fall school picture…..
I said I’d write more about this….and after a huge delay it’s time to get back at it.
For soccer, the coaches for each age group run the tryouts, and they are asked to find people to help them. This can, and has, led to some issues of favoritism, etc. Basketball has gone away from that model and asked this local group (that Cpher and Matthew have trained with) to do the evaluations in the hope of being ‘truly independent’.
There’s a few things wrong with this model:
1) There is no consideration given to how the player has performed in the past, only that hour that the evaluators see them. If you have a kid who, once he hits the field, shrinks away from contact or the ball, but looks A+ in practice, well, he’s going to show up great here.
2) For soccer, until last year, I ran two 90 minute sessions of tryouts. That’s 3 hours to sort through the who’s and what’s. And I never had more than 2 or 3 kids past the roster limit. Here, for 5th grade, they had 41 kids that they looked at for about an hour.
3) If you pay to train with the independent evaluators (like Cpher and Matthew, and many others have in the past) and you make enough of an impression on them that they remember you, you probably have an advantage.
Anyway…….
After that hour of evaluations everyone adjourns to the cafeteria to organize their thoughts; boys go home. The head coach and me (the assistant) get to come and provide input……Each evaluator ranked a top 10 (supposedly) and then identified the boys they thought should be cut (to compete in the rec program).
Cpher is not in the first ten (the ‘a’ team)….they end up giving a group of the next seven, and Cpher is in that ‘group’. They go on to give the next 3, and then another 4. Move on to cuts; nine of the 41 are out. We coaches make our first recommendation; they had a boy as a cut that we disagreed with; so, he moved out of that group.
Move back up to the top group; the head coach asks the question of the night….Cpher not in top 10. The basketball advisory board says we can’t move any players down, but we can move a player up and expand the roster from ten to eleven….and that’s what happens.
Fast-forward to today: we’ve had three practices. I think there are two players that I wonder how they made the top ten. The other big guy has better dribbling skills then Cpher and is more aggressive (he will foul you. a lot.). But, Cpher knows the position better and is in much better shape. He’s going to be just fine on this team….doesn’t look out of place at all.
