Keeping Teams Fair and Balanced

In the past, and still in many other sports leagues, coaches team up with other dads to create super-teams. Protected players (children of the coaches) get pooled into one team and dominate every other team in the league. Other teams, no matter how good a draft they had, sometimes don't even stand a chance to compete.

We recognize the need for head coaches to have an assistant coach they can depend upon. Coaching a youth sports team can be a daunting task, especially if that coach has a busy career and more than one child playing sports. We strive to protect the ability of a coach to choose an assistant they know will be able to help running practice when they can't make it - but we also recognize that the system can be "gamed". Removing 1 protected coach has allowed head coaches the ability to find a dependable helping hand, while positively impacting competition in our league.

Firstly, skills assessment is NOT a "tryout". Skills assessment is an opportunity for all head coaches to have a chance to evaluate key skills and characteristics of each player. If a player does not attend the assessment, this significantly impacts our ability to fairly evaluate and place them. Coaches score each player on speed/running, throwing, catching, hitting, coachability (behavior, following directions during drills). A standardized scale (as discussed at a pre-assessment coaches' meeting) is used to evaluate players. Non-coach evaluators are included in the draft and no coach's evaluation of their own son or daughter is used in the overall score of the player.

After evaluations are completed, overall scores are calculated and a rank value is assigned to each player. While this does NOT necessarily mean the #1 ranked player is the best player (skills assessment does not necessarily translate to game play), it does mean that the coaches evaluating players saw the best display of skill THAT day.

The importance of the rank list is that each "protected player" (son/daughter of a coach or assistant coach) is then automatically placed into a pre-selected round of the draft based on an objective assessment of his or her skill level, as determined by several other coaches and independent evaluators. This makes for a smoother draft that is less impacted by talented "protected players".

After executing the above changes (one assistant coach, more emphasis on skills assessment/evaluations to appropriately place protected players), we suspected that competition would be positively impacted. One of our board members performed an evaluation of the results of the past 2 Rookie Division seasons to determine the impact our changes had on the competition level of our Rookie Division. The impact: more "competitive" games, fewer "noncompetitive" games, and a fairer distribution of skilled players.

Efforts are currently being made to analyze the impact of these changes in the major and minor divisions. Anecdotally, the feedback has been that we've had some of the most competitive seasons in recent memory in both divisions!