It’s the start of the season. The teams are taking to the field for their five games of the new season. You, the league administrator, quickly realize there are teams that are out of place. Either they are blowing their competition out of the water or sinking like the Titanic. In any case, you have to go through the time-consuming process of shifting teams either up or down so that evenly matched teams will be able to play one another. What is the best way to deal with this challenge?
The Status Quo
Today there are generally three ways that clubs and leagues handle the issue of unbalanced divisions:
- Reshuffling teams: Many leagues will break their season into two or three sub-seasons. After one or two seeding rounds, divisions are finalized and the competition is balanced. It’s a fair amount of extra work, but in the end the divisions are balanced.
- Pre-season Player Evaluations: Many clubs will try to quickly evaluate all of their players after a few preseason practice sessions. The input is taken from the coaches and volunteers, and they attempt to create balanced teams.
- Proactive Player Evaluations: Have coaches evaluate players at the end of the season. When they come back to play next season their skill level is already measured and balanced teams can be created by this input.
Get Proactive
Although practice of reshuffling teams is common (point #1 above), it does cause considerable administrative nightmares. The problem is that schedules need to be created and communicated in a very short period of time (usually over a weekend). Often coaches and players find out that the first game of their new schedule is today. And standings create further confusion; do they carry forward from the previous round or do they start over?
Pre-season evaluations don’t really give a fair representation of a child’s skill level, because the observation time is so limited. If a child makes one great play, he/she will be pegged as a great player, but come regular season that could end up being her best play of the year.
All of this could be avoided if divisions were balanced right from the start. Is it possible to achieve this?
Creating balanced teams for this season can be achieved without shifting teams between divisions or the pre-season player evaluations. The starting point to creating balance this season begins at the end of last season. At the end of the season, coaches have a very good idea of the skill level of kids and it only takes a few minutes to rate all of the players on the team.
For the start of the next season, administrators can create balanced teams with reliable information.
Through proactive player evaluations, club and league administrators can greatly reduce their workload for the following season.
Challenges with Implementation
There are a few of challenges associated with implementation. First, coaches traditionally hang up their clipboard after their last game of the season. The administrative duties associated with coaching end at the last whistle of the last game. However, proactive player evaluations require that they do one more thing. This change in process can be painful the first year. Getting cooperation from your coaches is key.
The second challenge is coaches’ bias. If a team loses all of its games and the coach rates his players higher than 8 out of 10, there is a bias. Likewise, another coach might not give any of his players a rating higher than 6. Obviously that would skew the team building in the following season.
There are three things that you can do to decrease the coaches’ bias:
- Provide guidelines for the coaches to do evaluations.
- Monitor the average evaluation of each team. Correct those that are far from the average.
- Get a second opinion where necessary.
Lastly, the design of your club and league play may not lend itself to this new process. Proactive player evaluations work best in clubs that run large house leagues where a high percentage of players are returning each year.
Best Chance of Success
Lastly, your chances of success will greatly increase if you have a functional player database that includes a field for player evaluations. The evaluations can be a tremendous amount of information to track and without a database it will likely get lost before the next season.
If you have any questions about how to implement this, please feel free to call or email and I would be happy to discuss.
Chris Groot has also been involved in sport at both the recreational and competitive levels for all of his life. He has been recognized as an OCAA Men's Soccer All Star (1996), Redeemer College Male Scholar/Athlete of the Year (1996/97), and has worked as a basketball official for several years. He is co-founder and VP Marketing of ITSportsNet (www.itsportsnet.com), a product of ITology Ltd.
Proactive Player Evaluations