How to Assess Youth Players Without Ranking Them

Saturday's game went badly. We lost the ball every time we tried to play out from the back, so on Monday we practiced playing out from the back. The week after, something else went wrong, and we practiced that instead.

I coached like that for a long time, and so do most of the coaches I've stood next to. It's not strange. The latest problem is the one you can see, and it's the one in your head when you plan practice on Sunday night. But nothing builds over time, and you end up treating symptoms.

The season plan that dies in October

We've tried doing it properly, too. Before the season the coaches sit down, write a document about what the team and each player should develop, and start out ambitious. Then come the games, the practices and the parent emails, and by October you're back to taking things as they come.

That's not because coaches stop caring. There's simply nothing that holds on to the plan once everyday life takes over. There's no time to follow up, so it gets forgotten.

It looks like a tactical problem, but it often isn't

Here's something I've seen in every ball sport I've coached. We've talked about playing the pass into space, and it doesn't happen. It's easy to assume the player hasn't understood the tactics, so the next practice gets more tactics.

But often the ball arrives on the wrong foot. The player has to move it onto his stronger foot first, and by then the space is gone. What he needs is technique, so that he's confident enough to play the pass first time. Sometimes it really is understanding that's missing. But you can't tell which without a picture of the player that's wider than the last game.

The same goes for the physical side. You see that someone doesn't get there in time and think speed. But running fast in a straight line is rarely the problem in a ball sport. It's changing direction, and that agility and strength need their own training.

Four areas instead of what you happen to see

What has helped me most is thinking in four areas. The model comes from the English Football Association and is called the Four Corner Model: technical and tactical, physical, psychological and social.

The point isn't that there are exactly four. The point is that they force you to ask about the things you're not looking at. What you see on the pitch is how the ball is handled, so you end up with a lot of technique and a bit of tactics. The psychological and social sides get forgotten, because they don't show up in a passing drill.

And each area has many steps. Take communication. A player who shouts for the ball is communicating. The next step is when he starts guiding others – "man on", "cover him" – and it isn't about getting the ball himself. That's a real step forward, and you miss it if all you watch is the passing.

Don't start too early

Fun matters at every age. If it isn't fun, there's no point. With the youngest children it's also the only thing you need to think about. The Swedish Floorball Federation's development model calls ages 6 to 9 the "joy of movement" stage, and at that age I don't assess anything.

Somewhere around ten, the group usually shows you when it's time. You see frustration in both directions: the players who have come further never get the pass back, and the ones who haven't can't get the pass off before someone's on them. That's when the group is ready for grouping by level, and when it makes sense to follow each player more closely.

The numbers belong to the coaches, not the kids

When I put numbers on players' skills, they stay with the coaches. I don't show them to the kids, and I never tell a player he's a five.

The rhythm looks roughly like this. Once or twice a year the coaches sit down and go through where the team and each player stand. In between, you watch the players as usual. If I see someone has got quicker, I move him up a step, both in his profile and in how I set up the drills. It takes a few seconds. After a season you have a complete picture you could never have pieced together from memory.

With teenagers, share the areas

From around twelve or thirteen you can start talking to the players about which areas there are. Not about the ratings I've given, but about how becoming a complete player takes more than smashing every shot into the top corner.

One thing I do is let them rate themselves on the same areas. That way they understand what the game is made of, and I hear how they see their own level. Then the conversation can be about something concrete: I think you should work on this, and here's why. Never "you're a five and the others are sevens". That isn't useful to anyone.

Grouping by level is not ranking

This is where you have to be clear. The Swedish Floorball Federation does not allow selection or stacking teams with the strongest players before the year a player turns 15. It recommends keeping age groups together and adapting the training instead.

That's exactly how I see it. I believe in adapting to level within the group, so everyone gets to play at their level. Players who have come far need to play with others who have come far. Players who haven't have far more fun with others at the same level, because otherwise they never touch the ball when everything moves too fast around them.

In practice I split the session in two. The first part is technique, where level matters less. I just divide them up: six there, six there, six there. That blurs the levels.

The second part is more tactical drills and small-sided games, where tempo affects the quality of the drill. That's where I use the levels. But I don't put the eight I think are sharpest in the same group every time. I use a weighted draw: most of the strongest end up in the stronger teams, but the ones just below are sometimes drawn in there too. It creates rotation, and nobody gets stuck in the same group from one practice to the next.

That's how the numbers started for me: a way to mix the teams so the same boys weren't always playing together, while keeping them at roughly the same level. Never to keep track of who's best right now. That's irrelevant in youth sport.

What a tool can and can't do

No child goes from A to B overnight because I put a number on him. The step forward comes from active coaching, from having it in the back of your mind that this player needs support with exactly this and giving him a tip. Player development is a marathon, not a sprint.

What a tool can do is remember for you. It holds on to the plan when October comes.

That's why we've built player profiles into QuickSquad. You choose which skills in the four areas apply to your squad and set a value from 1 to 10 when you see a change. Each level has a short description of what you see on the pitch and what it takes to reach the next level. The texts follow your sport, so in floorball passing is about forehand and backhand, and in football it's about the strong and weak foot. If you like, the strength used in the draw can be calculated from the assessments, so the weighted split is based on the whole picture and not on a number you set in August.

There is no leaderboard, and the squad can't be sorted by who's best. Levels are used where they help, when you plan the session. There you can sort the groups by level, for example to see how many players at a given level are here today and decide how big the small-sided groups should be.

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