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posted 05/08/2013 Dear Parents,
As you are all most likely aware, rosters for the 2013/14 season are now available. To get to the "final product," it took a great deal of effort from coaches, on ice assistants, evaluators, and people helping with check-in desks. The number of human hours to support this process was very substantial and all of this effort was volunteered time. The success of our program relies on this type of volunteerism and parental participation - THANK YOU to all of those that helped!
While there is no perfect nor flawless system in rostering teams, I want to explain to you the measures we applied for evaluating players and forming teams. I hope it will demystify the process and answer any questions you might have.
The rostering of teams was a balance of both qualitative and quantitative data. Just after the half-point of the season, we asked head coaches to rank the players on their team and to evaluate each player on a number of skills ranging from skating & stick handling to overall game effectiveness and so on. We also solicited general feedback on attendance, attitude, etc.
For the tryouts, we had anywhere from 4-6 NYH coaches serve in running drills or in evaluating. We also enlisted the help of Teams Training join our process and to offer a more objective, third party perspective in evaluating skills. Each player was evaluated on similar skills that we asked coaches to assess earlier in the season. Evaluators scored the skills of each player and also issued an overall score for each player.
For the overwhelming majority, the rankings offered by head coaches and the rankings from tryouts were congruent. For those instances where there rankings conflicted, I shared the findings with the current coach to glean further insights. Additionally, I shared with all head coaches how each of their players performed relative one another and to see if they had any additional feedback that could be helpful before finally rostering teams. Given the number of skaters we had to evaluate and roster, I hope you feel like many measures were taken to ensure that there was a fair process in place.
Ice hockey (in my very biased perspective) is the best sport out there. Just as we should not over-stress wins and losses with our children, keeping a positive attitude when it comes to rostering is also important. Regardless of where you child was rostered, we hope you will continue to encourage him or her to see the wonder in what some skates, a stick and a puck can offer us all.
My best wishes to you for an enjoyable summer. Hockey season starts in about 4 months!!!
Nick Tuozzolo
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