Players Assessment

Yesterday we started our first part of our build up to North Harbour Under 18's 2010. North Harbour have been running a skills academy for under 15 & Under 17 players for the past few years with a focus on upskilling these players to feed into age group rep teams as they will be eligible for two years in the age group. We started our identification process yesterday with a 2 hour Player assessment workshop that consisted of the following:

Fitness: Yo Yo Test You can see an example of a yo yo test at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwYx62e2VJI
Passing Assessment
Running/Commit Defender Assessment
Defence
Ball into Contact
Support Play

The Assessment puts each player into a situation where we can view players performing the skill in game related situations. We had a large group of 34 players and to assess each player meant we had 4 different coaches assessing and rotated the players in mini units.
I was looking after Running Commit Defender Assessment and here is the breakdown of what we were looking at:

Ball Carrier Commit
Controls Position
Eye Contact
Running Lines, "Y" lines
Change of Pace-Pull
Split Vision
Controls Defenders
Decision to pass
Timing of pass
Stays Involved

Support Player
Positioning (depth)
Scanning
Controls Defender
Finds Space
Timing
Running lines, "Y" lines
Adjusts for support

each player was looked at on their left side and right side and rated on a scale of (3 best - 1 worst)

The interesting thing when you break it down to the fundamentals a theme became apparent across the player base and you start to see the areas that trainings will need to be focused from the "get go".

Skill testing is an area often overlooked as a "not enough time" or "Takes to much resource" scenario for coaches. I personally believe this is a critical factor to the blueprint of our planning as coaches. If you want to play a game based around using the width of the field but your passing as a unit is not there or Playing a confrontational game but players unable to "win the contact" at the collision area it will become a battle to achieve game plan. To me skill testing is an essential part of assessing your team profile and vital before planning game plans!