Running effective soccer tryouts requires careful planning and attention to detail in order to gain the most benefit from the available time for players and prospective coaches alike.

The fine balance you have as the organizer, whether that is an individual organizer or a committee in charge or planning the soccer tryouts is making the most of the time available and making sure all the players are given enough of an opportunity to express themselves.

I will call on personal experience now to give you some examples of situations to avoid, then finish with a typically effective schedule and some session ideas.

So the first thing to bear in mind is the reason to hold a tryout is to allow coaches to select teams of players based on their individual level of talent or potential, an equally important reason for holding a tryout is to allow youth players to show their potential through varied activities testing a range of skills.

In terms of physical needs from a coaching perspective, you need to give players every opportunity to sign up to tryouts early. The clearer indication you have of expected player numbers, the better chance you have of running effective soccer tryouts. From this point you can arrange the correct equipment to be available on the day, for example, soccer balls, colored bibs/pinnies, cones,goals and field space.

Let’s say you have a 2 hour time slot and 50 players trying out. I’ve seen tryouts where the initial 40 minutes is spent getting players signed in and prepared. warm ups tend to fall by the wayside and players are asked to stretch and get ready. The remaining hour and 20 minutes is spent running players through various activities to test skill sets such as passing ability, shooting, defending and game based activities.

The available time remaining offers 20 minutes per skill based session, which on paper, sounds like enough time to be able to get the activity underway and successfully rate the player’s ability, however the reality is quite far from the theory.

Consider that 20 minute slot, the coach will spend 3 to 5 minutes explaining the activity, the players will take a few minutes to properly absorb and execute the session leaving very little time to give a considered evaluation of each player’s skills during each session (especially when you factor in time for water breaks and re organisation of sessions and groups for the next activity.)

Through trial and error, and seeing what works well and what doesn’t work quite as well, here’s a few tips on running effective soccer tryouts:

Prior planning is key for running effective soccer tryouts: enlist parents to help with the sign in processes. Assign each player a colored bib/pinnies with a number. An equal number of colored pinnies makes it easy to group players for games, numbers make it easy to score players without bias. Print out lists of numbers with a scoring criteria for each skill. The more parents/coaches you have scoring the players, the more chance you will have of getting a fair assessment of each player.

Use the warm up as part of your scoring process: How players respond to instruction is a key indicator of how coach-able they will be, and how they are able to retain information.

Keep activities simple and repetitive: No lines, no waiting, just easy to understand activities that involve a lot of repetitions, this gives coaches chance to get a good valuation of each player and each player a chance to prove their skills.

Double up on skill assessment where you can: a 1 v 1 drill may be initially focused on a player’s individual dribbling ability and creativity, but this is also a chance to assess the other player’s defensive technique.

Don’t over coach: the time for coaching is over during tryouts, by all means make corrections, but ultimately this is an assessment of skills.

Allow a good amount of time for small sided games but do not weight your judgement of a player’s in game ability over other skills tested during the tryouts. some players perform better in practice in games but can clam up during game situations, especially if they know they are being marked.

Set a time schedule and stick to it: if you over run in certain areas, it means you will have to scale back in other areas.

I would always recommend running a second tryout too, and take a player’s average score across the two tryouts. Tryouts can be daunting occasions and i believe running two tryouts gives every player the opportunity to give the best account of their ability as possible.

I hope you enjoyed this article on how to run effective soccer tryouts.

Comment below with your thoughts and if you have any questions or tips on running soccer tryouts…