Tryouts

Making a difficult process a little easier

This week is Beach Week and I have a couple of beach-related posts in the hopper for later this week, but first: a tryout post. I had this planned for next week’s Mailbag and Q&A series, but with some high school (and even club!) tryouts as early as this week, I’m swapping the order and bumping this up to the top. I hope it helps!

I’ve gotten quite a few questions about how to run a tryout. I’m going to share an idealized tryout process for high school, and then talk a little about how it can apply to a club program as well.

Overall Schedule

Let’s start with the big picture before we zoom in.

Day 1 Session 1 (9:00 - 11:00) - Physical Evaluation
Day 1 Intermission (1:00) - First Notice
Day 1 Session 2 (3:00 - 5:00) - Serve + Pass Evaluation
Day 1 Evening (7:00) - Second Notice
Day 2 Session 1 (9:00 - 11:00) - Setting, Hitting, Learning Evaluation
Day 2 Session 2 (3:00 - 5:00) - Final Evaluation
Day 2 Evening (7:00) - Final Varsity Notice
Day 3 Session 1 (9:00 - 11:00) - JV Tryout
Day 3 Intermission (1:00) - Final JV Notice
Day 3 Session 2 (3:00 - 5:00) - First Varsity Practice

Okay what does this all mean?

I’m going to assume that we have the ability to do a multi-day tryout. Most high school teams have the ability to do that. In this case there’s going to be two days of varsity tryouts with two sessions per day. After those two days you’ll have the varsity team picked and you’ll have an additional morning session on Day 3 to finish selecting the JV team.

Club teams generally don’t have the ability to a do a multi-day tryout, at least not in an environment as controlled as this one. If you do have multiple days of tryouts, it’s likely that’s because you have lots of kids that only come to 1 day because they are also trying out at other clubs. However, I’m a big believer that clubs should NOT just evaluate players on only one day of tryouts. More on that below. Potential hot take warning.

Session Details

Let’s look at the hour-by-hour breakdown of the first 72 hours of high school season.

Day 1 Session 1 (9:00 - 11:00) - Physical Evaluation
-Measure everybody's standing reach.
-Measure everybody's jumping touch. (Off an approach jump if you have a Vertec-style tester, but a stationary block jump touch is okay too if all you can do is tape on a wall.)
-Take a picture of every kid and label it with their name. Polaroids used to be the easy way to do this. (Sounds weird and not as important if your program is small, but if you have 50 kids trying out, you will NOT remember all their names after one session.)

While everybody is getting that measured (by an assistant), the kids can warm-up and get into some spiking.

9:00 - Pepper
9:10 - Self-Toss Attacking (you don't need radar guns although it's cool if you have them)
9:30 - Coach-Toss Attacking
9:45 - Hitting Line Off a Set

That'll be your first hour and then the second hour will be something like:

10:00 - Individual Serving (radar guns are great, OTM targets are great, just serving hard into an empty court is okay if that's all you got)
10:15 - Split-Court Doubles ("work up" style where there's a top court and a bottom court is great, but you can also just start manually sorting)
10:35 - Queen of the Court or whatever 3v3/4v4 you like

The goals of this session are:
1. Identify who your biggest players are (not just height but how high they can get up above the net)
2. Identify who can hit a ball hard
3. Identify who can serve a ball hard
4. Identify any kids who are not even close to a varsity level, who are completely unfamiliar with volleyball, who might risk injuring themselves or others by mixing in with varsity girls, etc.

Day 1 Intermission (1:00) - First Notice