I. Developing Player Metrics

The season is over, the helmets have been sent to reconditioning and your sights now shift from in-season game planning to end-of-year analysis. Like a forensic specialist, coaches will dissect, evaluate and reflect on every aspect of the past season. The ability to gain a functional understanding of what parts of your program’s curriculum progressed, regressed or failed is essential to developing the narration of next season. In the St. Charles North football program, we break our evaluations into three major categories:

1. Personnel
   1. Staff, coordinators, football operations, players, parent group
2. Systems
   1. Technology, media, community, etc.
3. Scheme
   1. Offense, defense, special teams, program vocabulary, culture programming, tackling, takeaways

 

In this article, we focus our attention on player evaluation and the ability to build an easy and fun metric that can be used to give each player a quantifiable grade. Attaching numbers to players not only allows you to track overall program strengths and weaknesses but also develop differentiated, individualized improvement plans for each player.

II. Evaluation / Personnel Prep

The first step in our process is to create an efficient and streamlined environment that allows our coaches to access all information without being face-to-face. In order to do this, we utilize Google Drive/ Classroom / Sheets. A workspace is created that houses all the needed materials so that coaches can complete their evaluations on their own time. This also allows the head coach immediate access to the completed materials. Within the Google workspace the following items are included:

• Complete program roster
  • User-friendly aid to help keep track of who is evaluating who.  

• Team photo
  • Allows level coaches to visually ID players. Upper-level coaches get an opportunity to learn lower-level faces and names easier.
• Individual photo
  • Used during personnel meetings to visually ID the player.
• Player evaluation sheet
  • Written rating system.
• Player metrics Google sheet
  • Scores are used to create a cumulative grade out of 100 or “Madden rating.”
• Screencastify explaining evaluation scoring

 

All materials are disseminated via Google Classroom or sites. This allows coaches to have 24/7 access from a desktop or smartphone. A hard deadline is given so that evaluations are completed prior to the quarter two personnel meeting in February.

III. Player Evaluation Card

At St. Charles North, we employ one common evaluation sheet that all coaches will utilize.

Players are evaluated based on two main components: Character/Cognitive and Athletic/Football Ability. Each component is broken it subpoints that are rated on a 1-5 scale. Think of the rating scale as the following:

5 – Excellent: collegiate skills

4 – Above average: varsity skill

3 – Average: sophomore skill

2 – Below average: freshman skill set

1 – Poor: general lack of skill set

A standardized rubric allows for a consistent and defined matrix that creates a horizontally aligned grading system between coaches and position groups. By creating a common language, we can begin to evaluate our players with consistency, accuracy and transparency.

Character/Cognitive

Athletic/Football Ability

The remainder of the evaluation is used for short answer, dialogue provoking questions. We discuss player traits both good and bad. We have since gone away from the “worst” trait question and focus on areas of potential growth. This was done to support our philosophy of being a more positively driven program. I believe in allowing coaches to write as much or as little about a player. We want to be able to create fluid profiles for all our players. We refer to these evaluations in both staff personnel meetings and player support meetings. They are the catalyst to open discussions between coaches and players. Our players have open knowledge to everything on our evaluation cards. We want them to take an added investment into their development. It is important to openly communicate the plan to each player as they deserve the time and will appreciate the honesty.

IV. Player Metrics

The evaluation card is now turned in and the scores are inputted into our player metric system. This phase of our player evaluation adds a few more categories, such as values for height/weight and player production. It provides a slightly more in-depth evaluation of each player. The goal is to walk away with a percent grade for each player. We like to call it our “Madden score.” The cumulative score each player receives is then put into a grading system based out of 100. Similar to the Madden score, the closer to 100 a player gets, the better the football player (in theory).

The data that is yielded from this evaluation is valuable from both an individual and program perspective. Individually, we can compare a player’s growth year-to-year based on a +/- growth number. It also affords opportunities to have transparent dialogue with our players on what specifically they need to work on. From a program perspective, the color coding allows us to look for “hot” spots within our program. For example, if we see a high level of red in the football IQ metric, then we know it needs to be a focus of the program the coming year. Additionally, it allows us to graph our progress and individual development. This is a great visual for both players and coaches. Our philosophy is that our upper 90 percentile will always be that way but how can we raise our middle third even if it’s marginal for an individual. If each player improves by 2 percent, the compound growth for our team is enormous.

 

V. Closing Remarks

If this seems extensive and too labor intensive, I would agree. However, the time to get to know your personnel is an investment worth making. It helps to build your culture when players see you putting in the time to develop a plan for their individual needs. It allows your staff to have a direct input into your program’s player development plan. It also opens opportunities for great discussion. I am under the philosophy that in high school football it is more about players than plays. It essential to get our players to be at their best. The month of November and December is a great building block. The next step is to build an eight-month plan for each player that is individualized, goal orientated and results driven. I will dive into that aspect in my next article about benchmarks and player development plans.