There are many different approaches that coaches, players, and parents take once a season transpires. Often, it is dependent on how the season ended. No matter what the outcome was, it is important to take time to reflect, set goals, and move forward. Check out this post for tips on how Dr. Dish recommends you handle your post-season evaluations.... which is different than what you might think and snag a PDF example to use as your guide!
Starting high-level, there are a few things we like to recommend you do after the season ends. Those being pretty common like an end of year "banquet", a coach deep dive, and individual player meetings. We will primarily focus on the individual player meetings in this post, because we believe a lot of wasted energy is spent there. AND, our recommendations might not be what you think...
Doing Traditional Coach-Led Player Evals Is Not Time-Well-Spent
Hey Coach, we believe that your time is NOT best well-spent filling out post-season player evaluations. If you spend your time doing anything, it should be providing your players with tangible drills and goal completion quantities for them to work towards in the post-season and summer season. We know that most programs have limited time and resources, which is why it is better to focus your attention on a one-size-fits-most workout plan that will help guide a player to excel at the level they are at.
If you have a Dr. Dish, it could be as simple as building out workouts in our Training Management System or finding your favorites from our library that fit your team's principles and assigning it to your players.
The unfortunate truth is that your typical player evaluations, which could take a coach hours to complete, may not be very valuable to a player. If a player requests one, definitely do it! Those are the very pro-active players who are feedback-driven.
However, what we'd recommend in replacement is a player-led post-season evaluation. After the season ends, provide your player's with self-evaluations that they must fill out themselves. Self-awareness in life and sports is very important. The sooner that an individual can self-identify their strengths and weaknesses and HOW they plan to address them, the better. With your guidance, a player can use this as ongoing motivation.
It is important to remember that while the topic of this post is around sharing the best post-season player evaluation - these can be distributed at any time during the season for a player to complete.
Why Player-Led?
We'd like to challenge you to empower your player (or child) to perform a self-evaluation as a starting point for an end-of-season (or middle of season) evaluation. When an individual feels like their success/destiny can be taken into their own hands, it can be a powerful thing!
Feedback coming from the top town is often not motivating to an individual. If someone instead can tell you what they believe their strengths and weaknesses are, and what their goals are they can ultimately take the responsibility of their success into their own hands. With your help as an accountability partner, not a dictator, you can provide feedback to their responses and recommendations for how they can improve in an informal manner.