Coach / Evaluator Resource · ASPP Mental Performance Partnership
Running a Better Tryout
A good tryout should help you see athletes clearly, not simply see who handles the most confusion.
The goal is not to remove pressure or lower standards. The goal is to reduce unnecessary evaluative noise so the tryout gives you better information about the athletes in front of you.
Start Here
Pressure is part of tryouts. Confusion does not have to be.
Athletes already understand that they are being evaluated.
When expectations, instructions, feedback, and selection criteria become unnecessarily unclear, you may end up measuring who best navigates uncertainty rather than who best fits the role.
A better tryout keeps the challenge meaningful while making the environment easier to understand.
A practical evaluator framework
CLARIFY → OBSERVE → RESET → REASSESS
Make the task understandable
Athletes should know what they are being asked to do before they are judged on how well they do it.
Keep instructions short, role-specific, and consistent.
Watch the behavior, not just the outcome
A single result can hide useful information.
Look for decision-making, communication, response to mistakes, effort, adaptability, and how the athlete performs the role being evaluated.
Give the athlete a chance to re-enter
If an athlete gets emotionally stuck after a mistake, one short cue may give you a clearer look at what they can actually do.
Resetting is not rescuing. It is removing unnecessary carryover from the previous rep.
Look for patterns, not single moments
Selection decisions are stronger when they are based on repeated evidence across the tryout rather than one highly visible rep.
What creates evaluative noise
Some pressure helps you evaluate. Some pressure just distorts the sample.
Changing instructions midstream
Athletes may look inconsistent because the task itself keeps changing.
Giving different athletes different amounts of information
Uneven coaching input can make comparisons less clean.
Overreacting to individual mistakes
Athletes may become more focused on avoiding errors than performing the role.
Leaving expectations unnecessarily vague
If athletes are guessing what matters, you may be measuring mind-reading instead of performance.
Improve the quality of the evaluation
Define what you actually want to see
Before the tryout begins, identify the behaviors that matter for the role.
What does good performance look like?
Define the responsibilities, decisions, and behaviors that matter for this position or group.
What happens after mistakes?
Notice whether the athlete can reconnect, communicate, and return to the next task.
What keeps showing up?
Look for repeated evidence across multiple reps rather than letting one moment define the athlete.
An important distinction
Helping an athlete reset is not the same as protecting them from pressure
Tryouts should still require athletes to make decisions, respond to mistakes, manage nerves, and compete under evaluation.
The difference is that avoidable confusion, excessive commentary, and inconsistent messaging do not necessarily give you better information.
Keep the meaningful demands. Remove the noise that does not help you evaluate.
What this can sound like
Short language keeps the athlete in the tryout
Clarify the job
“We're looking at communication and decision-making here.”
Reset without overcoaching
“Reset. Next rep.”
or
“Back to your job.”
Give one useful adjustment
“Keep scanning earlier. Everything else stays the same.”
Evaluator check
Ask whether you're seeing the athlete or reacting to the moment
Tryouts move quickly, which makes it easy for one dramatic rep to become disproportionately important.
Before making a strong judgment, ask:
Is this a pattern, or is this one moment?
Am I evaluating the role, or reacting to the outcome?
Have I given this athlete enough comparable opportunities to show me something?
Practical tool
Running a Better Tryout Guide
Use the ASPP evaluator guide before tryouts to clarify what you are evaluating, what athletes need to know, and how you will handle mistakes and feedback during the process.
Keep this in mind
Better conditions can produce better information
A strong tryout still has pressure, competition, mistakes, uncertainty, and consequences.
The goal is simply to make sure those demands are helping you evaluate the athlete rather than obscuring what the athlete can actually do.
Coach & Organization Support
Want help applying this to your tryout process?
ASPP can support coaches and organizations with tryout structure, evaluator language, athlete-response strategies, and practical mental-performance integration.