The evaluation process

How often do you evaluate? Throughout your everyday life, you execute millions of decisions – a lot of which are unconscious – to progress throughout your day. During your work place you will be given tasks to complete, with some needing to be completed by a certain deadline. When you arrive home, the choices down’t stop there, with more tasks required to complete your day. While you wouldn’t be expected to sit down and evaluate what you had for dinner, the process itself can be very rewarding.

You currently manage/coach a team and all the players within this squad are looking to you for direction, guidance and inspiration. Throughout the week, you probably host a minimum of 1 training session, as well as a game. The question now is, how much of this process do you evaluate?

Evaluations could come across as tedious, but if done in the right way, they can be very effective and give you a solid foundation for the future.

A few areas of evaluation you could consider, are;

Preparation – Did you correctly analyse your current situation and plan as well as you could? We’re the players prepared accordingly?

During practice/game play – Once the players are taking part in their task, there will be lots of things happening. So much so, you probably wouldn’t be able to view everything in front of you. The ability to think ‘in’ action, is very tricky. One tip – focus on what you can control and divert attention away from what you can’t.

Your coaching actions – Your communication (verbal/non-verbal), is pivotal in starting off this process. Once you display certain types of communication, the receivers will attempt to understand what is requested of them.

The responses you observed from the squad – When the players step back into the competitive arena, you should take a step back and observe competency levels. Without reviewing this, you won’t be able to know if the players understand, what you have requested.

While this list isn’t exclusive, there are many other areas that can impact the outcomes of what you set out to do.
To ensure your evaluation is as accurate as possible, did you take the previous steps into consideration, previously?

Planning – Were your intentions aligned with the team objective and that of the players?

Information – Was the information you delivered, objective and accurate?

External factors – While you can’t control these, did you at least consider them?

One error a lot of coaches and managers make, is that they evaluate what the players did and the actions they executed.

“Why didn’t you get closer to your opponent?”

“ He was available for a pass, did you not see him?”

“How did you miss?”

This approach is wrong, because you can’t control the decisions of the players as they only contribute to the overall team intention.
The evaluation process, should begin at what information was delivered BEFORE the activity took place and how it was delivered. By doing this, you are reflecting on your own performance first and not that of the team. Your the coach, you make the decisions, so surely you should be evaluated first??

An evaluation of anything can be tricky and most certainly a challenge, as you are putting yourself in a position, where you have to basically admit, that something could be better. You executed the choice first, so now you’re trying to see if you’re incompetent in this area.

One way you can do this, is by reverse engineering a situation and this is what we will look at from next week, in the next coaching blog!