Rec Ball Select team

[Little Angels Softball]

From what I have seen, there is less bias in general with club teams, but it is by no means an oasis of morality in terms of choosing players.

Oh, heaven's no. Not even close.

But you can find a few out there where the only thing that matters is ability and those clubs offer the fairest shake of any. Debating the morality of choosing only the best is a different conversation, but at least everyone knows the criteria going in and has a chance to beat their competition, face to face.

I honestly think the entire tryout process is flawed and do not depend on it for my own final roster. Again, probably another conversation.

Your process sounds as good as any. I am not one to judge, as I realize we all work within the confines of our organizations. Even at the highest club levels, politics can still play a part in the selection process. I have had more than one national championship caliber team where at least one of the girls selected made the team because she had a sister in the org or a dad that coached elsewhere in the org. I cut better players because of it, and fully knew I was doing so. No morals or fairness there, for sure. But the big-time sponsor money keeps flowing when the org is kept happy, so I guess one can justify that it was for the greater good of the team, if one needs that affirmation. I, unfortunately, do not.

 

[left turn]

Oh, heaven's no. Not even close.

But you can find a few out there where the only thing that matters is ability and those clubs offer the fairest shake of any. Debating the morality of choosing only the best is a different conversation, but at least everyone knows the criteria going in and has a chance to beat their competition, face to face.

I honestly think the entire tryout process is flawed and do not depend on it for my own final roster. Again, probably another conversation.

Your process sounds as good as any. I am not one to judge, as I realize we all work within the confines of our organizations. Even at the highest club levels, politics can still play a part in the selection process. I have had more than one national championship caliber team where at least one of the girls selected made the team because she had a sister in the org or a dad that coached elsewhere in the org. I cut better players because of it, and fully knew I was doing so. No morals or fairness there, for sure. But the big-time sponsor money keeps flowing when the org is kept happy, so I guess one can justify that it was for the greater good of the team, if one needs that affirmation. I, unfortunately, do not.

Little Angels, this process is in the context of a local organization trying to get the travels team right.

I agree that tryouts are flawed. The tryout score comprises 50% of their overall score in our association. The other 50% is a combination of scores from travel ball and rec coaches. They assess the players' ability to contribute to the team.

I don't feel good about using coach ratings 100% because many people do not update their impressions of a player based on what they see. They often revert to their first opinions of the player, and just back-fill chery-picked information to back up what they believe in the first place. And since each individual coach sees the player every other week, it is difficult to see gradual improvement

Tryouts alone aren't good because a good player can have an awful day and a poor player can have an outstanding day. I have seen the best hitter in the grade whiff on the hitting while the player thought to be the 20th best player in a grade look like Micky Mantle.

So we use a combo of past performance/contribution and tryouts. Nothing is completely fair, but it's the best we can do.

 

[Coachmom]

Our league just joined the Tustin Federation last fall. I was a 12U coach and it was a great experience for the players and parents.
It's meant to keep the Allstar level players within the league and not searching for travel ball options in the fall. We had to do a tryout for that team and you also must have at least 5 returning players from your summer Allstar team to compete in the Federation.

 

[Momo'sDad]

That is so different than what we have in northern Jersey.

In our association we only have one group of teams by age. So there aren't upper and lower teams. Also we have a standard tryout process with a defined criteria and we use outside people to evaluate the players for the travel teams. We try to get competent assessors and they cannot know or have any material interest in whether the player makes the team. There had been so many bitter feelings about who makes travel teams, so we had to do something. So we developed the process to drive out as much bias as possible. Also our evaluation considers a historical rating (from the coaches) as well as the tryout result. We also communicated the tryout process to the community for transparency.

So here's the most interesting thing that happened when we implemented this process. Even though we are executing a process that is as fair as we could possibly make it, complaints did not go down significantly. These bitter feelings only went down a little. Just two weeks ago a player was cut from the travel team whose dad has been heavily involved with the board of directions. He still lost his mind and embarrassed himself. He couldn't accept that his child did not make the team.

I'm always interested in learning how other areas do things. Most of the full-time TB teams here have no rec league affiliation, so whether a coach is with an organization or is forming an independent team, only the HC and their staff are involved in team selection.

The fall select teams - which are associated with the rec leagues - do travel out of their towns, but aren't true TB teams. In our local league, coaches have always been allowed to form those teams however they wish. The only rules were that the coaches and players all had to be eligible and they had a max roster size of 15. Invariably, just as with All-stars, there were always hurt feelings because someone's kid didn't get picked. Whereas spring rec teams HAD to take players they might not select and might have to have 12 or 13, in the fall, coaches didn't have to carry anyone they didn't want and could roster as few as 9.

My partner and I held tryouts for our team, which made a lot of people upset, but the parents who knew their DD's would make it were happy. We made 12 offers, not expecting all to accept, and we ended up with a roster of 10. The players we didn't select went to other teams. Everyone played.

Outside of the rec season and All-star seasons, no offense, but I would not personally want to coach a group I had not selected myself.

 

[left turn]

Momo'sDad wrote, "Outside of the rec season and All-star seasons, no offense, but I would not personally want to coach a group I had not selected myself."

I certainly understand that.

The reason we put so much effort into having a travel team selection process that is as fair as we can make it, is there was so much strife, division & bitter feelings from how it was conducted before. The travel coaches were having "show" tryouts and choosing the players based on their friendships. The tryouts were thinly veiled exhibitions to give them the cover to do what they wanted to do.

Many times deserving players were left off the travel teams. There were so many bitter comments spilling over into the community. We had to fix it first because what they were doing was wrong. Secondarily, since there are so many options in the community (LAX, basketball, track, football, xbox, social media, etc), if we didn't find a way to calm down the negative comments in the community, we felt the long term registration of the organization would be affected. If the narrative in the community is the organization is not fair, some parents & players will think, "why bother", and move on to something else.