Player Evaluations - Please complete by Friday, March 14th.

Coaches -

Big thanks to all who have provided feedback on Driscoll. Over the next few days, we'll consolidate and send it to the board. If there is any last-minute feedback, please send it to me sooner rather than later.

I want to touch on the importance of player evaluations. It is CRITICAL that coach's complete your player evaluations for the season. I would ask that everyone has theirs complete by this Friday, March 14th.

player evaluations should and do carry significant importance when building teams for next year. Rating committees are encouraged to review the evaluations upon completion of each team, to ensure no one was overlooked, or misplaced. But we can only do this, if effective evaluations are prepared for the evaluation committee. There is a comments column - I always write up a small summary of my players (are they able to play both sides of the puck, what are their overall strengths / weaknesses, anything as a coach, you would want to know if you were receiving this player to your team).

While head coaches are required to submit evaluation forms, assistant coaches are encouraged to provide feedback as well. They can either work with their HC to receive a separate form, or provide their feedback to the HC and consolidate. For my teams, I have emailed my staff and asked them if they would like to provide feedback. If they do, then we combine our feedback into a consolidated list.

Evaluations and ratings are difficult. On my teams, we as coaches have seen the same set of 12-13 kids all season long, and still have different views on the rankings. The important thing is, we are accurately categorizing and grading the skaters, and ensuring that generally the kids are aligned appropriately.

One final thing I'll leave you as we head into tryouts, as I'm sure there are many raters on this email: remove any personal biases, whether it is for your skater, or against other skaters (hopefully this isn't the case). Having a skater play above their skill is a detriment to both the team, and the individual skater. If the game is a bit too fast, they may not get the proper development they otherwise would deserve. Framingham Youth Hockey is an incredibly deep program, and we still have people registering for tryouts today. This past season, the 10u and 12u "B" teams were competing against other program's A teams - so making a "B" team shouldn't be viewed as a negative. Plus, the A teams always are looking for call-ups (trust me) - so players on B teams are afforded the opportunity to skate with both throughout the season. Across the 10u and 12u levels, I would estimate that 75% of the games required at least 1 call-up.

You all have done an exceptional job this season, dedicating yourself to the kids of the program. Coaching is on a volunteer basis - and while I am thankful that you all are willing to sacrifice your time for these kids, I'm going to ask that you finish the season strong with coach's evaluations and proper evaluations at tryouts.

Best,

Casey & Eric