Make Your Tryouts Easier with SkillShark and TeamSnap

Does the thought of planning and holding tryouts for your youth sports club make you cringe? 

We don’t blame you. It can mean stacks of registration forms to sort through, evaluation scores to decipher, and stressed-out administrators, coaches, evaluators, players, and parents. 

Fortunately, there are ways to make preparing for and holding youth sports tryouts easier through sports software applications like SkillShark and TeamSnap. The two sports tech companies offer solutions for organizing tryouts and evaluating players, making it a smooth and simple process. 

 

Have an Organized Plan for Tryouts

Over the years, we’ve found that planning, planning and you guessed it, more planning is one of the key components for successful tryouts.  The other is having the right tools to help you along the way.  Planning, planning, planning. That can be the key to successful tryouts. Luckily, SkillShark and TeamSnap make it easy to run organized evaluations — while saving your club time and frustration:

• Utilize online registration solutions: Creating, sending, and collecting paper registration forms can be a hassle. To make the sign-up process easier, use the TeamSnap app. You can create a customized form online and then simply send the link to athletes. All the registration information will be collected in one place, eliminating the need to sort through paper forms and organize the information. You can also collect payments online to save yourself the hassle of chasing down checks.
• Create an evaluation template: Before tryouts, your organization needs to decide what skills to evaluate players on, and what drills to run. With the SkillShark app, you can create an evaluation template to list each individual skill and assign a scoring scale for evaluators to use. This ensures each athlete is evaluated on the same criteria and scoring method.
• Transfer your tryout lists: Once you have your registration information gathered in TeamSnap, you can easily transfer it into SkillShark’s Athlete Evaluation App. With a few clicks, all the player information from TeamSnap will be available — including player numbers — in the SkillSharks platform.
• Communicate tryouts information: No matter how much planning you do ahead of time, last-minute questions will always pop up before tryouts. Streamlining your communication through TeamSnap can help your coaches, parents, and players stay up to date on the latest information and any last-minute changes you make through group messaging, push notifications, SMS-notifications, and email alerts. 

 

Run Efficient Tryouts

The day of tryouts can be a stressful event — for players, clubs, and parents. Hosting well-organized tryouts is one of the best things you can do to make the day easier for everyone. 

• Simplify check-in: Skip long lines and chaos at the registration table with the SkillShark app. Admins working at the registration table can simply open the app and check players in as they arrive. From here, numbers can be assigned to each athlete, and a photo can be taken of each player and attached to his or her profile in the app allowing coaches and evaluators to put a face to a name or a number.
• Evaluate with ease: Evaluating players can be just as easy as checking them in. Through the SkillShark app, evaluators can use their mobile device to pull up the app, find the player they are evaluating, and enter a score or take notes. This ensures each athlete is being evaluated on the same scoring scale and criteria. By doing it in the app, club directors can check real-time data to see how athletes are performing and what the overall player rankings are across all players at tryouts.
• Quickly form rosters: After the tryouts conclude, the club can review all the scores and rankings in the app to easily and quickly form rosters. When announcing teams, coaches and directors can even send each athlete an evaluation report card to show the player and their parents how they performed.

 

Post-tryouts and in-season communication

Team communication and evaluations don’t end at tryouts — they go on throughout the entire season. Because of this, both SkillShark and TeamSnap have in-season solutions, as well: 

• Communication: After forming your roster in SkillShark, you can then sync your full squad back into TeamSnap to use their communication features throughout the season. This gives your team access to their full-season schedules, team communications, availability, and more.
• Mid-season evaluations: Athletes should receive mid-season evaluations and feedback to learn how they are performing and what they can work on the rest of the season. These can be easily done through the SkillShark app. Coaches can simply evaluate players, add feedback, and send it directly from the platform, and players will receive an easy-to-read mid-season report card to help them improve all year long. 

To learn more about the capabilities of SkillShark and how it can benefit your youth sports club, head over to SkillShark.com