Setting up a tryout program for your organization is the first step in building a strong season. A well-organized tryout ensures a smooth experience for players, parents, and coaches while making it easy to evaluate and select participants. From structuring your groups and divisions to customizing registration requirements and player evaluations, there are plenty of ways to tailor the process to fit your organization’s needs. Check out some of our recommendations and best practices to streamline your tryouts and set the stage for a successful season.
Setting Up Tryouts
Make the most of your tryout registration process by customizing it to fit your organization’s needs. In Program Registration, you can tailor everything from required forms and waivers to tryout fees and player information fields. Below are some helpful tips to streamline your setup, improve organization, and ensure a smooth experience for both admins and participants.
Select Tryout for the Program Type
Be sure to mark your program as a Tryout to create a dedicated setup designed just for tryouts. This will unlock system-specific features that help simplify registration, evaluations, and team assignments for a smoother process.
Settings
As a best practice, include printable forms like a medical release waiver in the tryout registration process. Parents can electronically sign these forms, which are then securely stored in the participant’s profile.
Fees & Discounts
If your organization requires a fee for tryouts, you can set up and manage those fees here.
Season Structure
Easily customize your season structure by organizing teams into groups or divisions based on gender, birth year, location, or tryout dates. Whether you're managing multiple tryouts across different sports, age groups, or need to set up specific divisions for tryouts, you have the control to structure everything just the way you need.
Once you have your Season Structure set up, don’t forget to create a Pool Team for each group or division. After creating your Pool Teams, turn on the Direct to Team Registration for your tryouts. This automatically adds participants to the group pool team, which enhances the mobile app workflow for coaches and directors.
Consider requiring a participant photo as part of your Tryout registration - If enabled, photos will be collected at the time of registration and be displayed on the mobile app. This helps Coaches and Directors not only see names but also easily recognize participants by their picture.
Creating Evaluation Templates
Use the form builder tool to quickly create custom Player Evaluation Templates for coaches to use during tryouts. Add checkboxes, text fields, and dropdowns to make player assessments simple and organized. Pro tip: Include a drop-down with team options so coaches can easily recommend players to specific teams for the season.
Granting Mobile Access for Coaches/Directors
Give the Coaches and Directors access to the tryout workflow by assigning them a Director role. You can customize the permissions needed for tryouts based on specific seasons, groups, divisions, or even genders to ensure they have the appropriate level of access for the participants they’ll be assessing.
Streamlining the Check-in Process with the Mobile App
Coaches and Directors can easily access tryouts by heading to the Admin Access section in the app and selecting the Dashboard. Once in the tryout setup, they’ll see all the pool teams they have access to, along with the registered participants. From there, they can check players in, add a photo (if one wasn’t uploaded during registration), and input tryout/uniform numbers—all with a few quick taps. Need to add a last-minute player? No problem – players who didn’t register beforehand can be manually added to the pool on the spot.
Completing Evaluations via the Mobile App
As tryouts are underway, Coaches and Directors can easily submit player evaluations by tapping the Evaluation button (paper clip icon) next to a participant’s name. Multiple evaluations can be submitted for each player, giving all evaluators the chance to share their feedback and help with player selection.
Depending on the program settings, Coaches and Directors have the option to directly add players to a specific team’s invite list, simplifying and accelerating the player invitation process.
Sending and Tracking Team Invitations
In Program Registration, as players are added to invite lists, send invites and track player responses. Player invite messages can be customized to include instructions or next steps for team acceptance.
Coaches and Directors can track player responses by viewing the Player Invitation Report located in the Team Page.
