To All West Vancouver Soccer Club Parents and Players,

The following will outline the process for player assessment for the West Vancouver Soccer Club for the 2009/2010 Season.  The new format is based on recommendations from the British Columbia Soccer Association.

Over the past decade the annual assessment of West Van players who wished to be considered for Select teams has focused on two main sources of information, the annual “try-out session” and the evaluations submitted by the player’s coach. This process has been successful and, for the most part, produced accurate results.  The one critique that has been noted, however, is the inability of the try-out session to allow a complete assessment, taking into account a player’s entire spectrum of qualities – their attitude, work ethic, and improvement over the season. Additionally, the one-shot “try-out session” could result in a misleading or inaccurate assessment if a player was nervous or having an ‘off’ day.  A longer-range evaluation process should help to address this problem and provide a more thorough assessment of a player’s skills, abilities, attitude and potential.

The BC Soccer Association mandated that the process of “scouting” be used along with coaches’ assessments for placing players on all Select U11 and U12 teams.  Since then, the West Vancouver Try-Out Committee, Technical Committee, and Coaching Committee have all been reviewing how the Club conducts player assessment with a view to improving the process and to comply with the new mandate. At a meeting of the Try-out Committee held on Tuesday December 11, 2007 it was agreed to recommend to the Club that in preparing for the upcoming 2008/2009 Season the Club introduce a new approach to player assessment for all age groups. This process would have player “scouting” as the key independent assessment of players in place of the previous “try-out session”.

In anticipation of this new direction, Head Coach, Jammer Afshar and Assistant Head Coach, Ros Hicks have already been working with the U10, U11, and U12 players to better appreciate the skills of these age groups. Starting immediately, with additional coaching support, they will be scouting all players for the remainder of the season.  Scouting will occur at both practices and games and will take place for all age groups from U10 to U17.

The second part of the player assessment process, the coach’s written player profile, remains a key component of the evaluation.  The coaches know their players very well, working with them multiple times per week. Recognizing its importance, we are now requesting two assessments for each player from all coaches, one at mid-season in December as well as the one they do near the end.  In this way a player’s progress can be better recorded and monitored more closely throughout the season. We value the coaches who work with our club teams very much and believe that including them in our player assessment procedure is essential.

Together the season-long scouting process and coaches’ player evaluations will provide a more clear and accurate assessment of player development and potential for all the players.  We will use this format to form next season’s U15 to U18 teams.  For our U10 to U14 teams, however, we have added a third component - an inter-club scouting series.  We will request each age group to come out on two separate occasions to play a jamboree-type tournament with the other teams of their age group.  The purpose is to give an opportunity where Jammer, Ros and their technical coaching staff, can work with all the players of one age group together to better assess their potential for the Select teams.

The Try-out, Technical and Coaching Committees are excited by this new direction for the player assessment process. We believe that this new approach represents a significant improvement over our old system by creating a player assessment process that increases the coaches’ input, is more comprehensive, better balanced and has less chance of error.

John N.R. Ruddick