What Coaches Look for at Tryouts

The table shows the share of a form's criteria that falls into each category. The share is worked out per form and then averaged, so a long form weighs the same as a short one. The median form lists 10 criteria.

• Skill: passing, shooting, skating, hitting, serving, fielding, ball handling.
• Physical: speed, agility, strength, endurance, size and timed fitness tests.
• Game sense: positioning, decision-making, reading the play, "hockey sense" and "basketball IQ".
• Attitude and character: coachability, effort, work ethic, competitiveness, focus.
• Communication and leadership: talking on the field, leading, being a good teammate, sportsmanship.
• Other: three small categories together. One score for a whole position such as "pitching", non-athletic items like grades or attendance when the form makes them a criterion, and anything that fits nowhere else.

Hockey forms most often score speed inside the skating line, which is why the physical share sits at 2%. Only 11% of hockey forms list a physical quality on its own line.

Read across the rows and the second place changes by sport. Attitude and character come second in basketball, hockey and volleyball. In soccer, game sense holds that spot. Baseball and softball forms put physical criteria second, at 20%. Communication and leadership stay small everywhere, between 3% and 7% of the criteria.

Basketball tryout forms score skill first and attitude second.

• Skill, 37% of criteria. Ball handling, shooting, passing and rebounding are typical lines.
• Attitude and character, 24% of criteria. 93% of basketball forms score at least one such trait, and 73% use the word attitude.
• Game sense, 15% of criteria, such as decision-making and court vision, scored on 87% of forms.
• Measured test on 20% of forms, such as timed lane slides or a count of lay-ups made(opens in new tab) and a dribble over a set distance(opens in new tab).

Weights show up here more than elsewhere. A basketball form says how much each criterion counts in 20% of cases. These forms also talk about the team more than most, with communication named on 40% of them and leadership on 27%.

On a Basketball Tryout Day

If you are the one trying out, the drills matter, and on most basketball forms the coach is also scoring what happens around them.

• Effort, hustle or work ethic (named on 80%). Forms spell it out as effort in transition(opens in new tab), crashing the boards(opens in new tab) and getting back on defense(opens in new tab). It shows on every change of possession.
• Attitude (named on 73%). The attitude lines describe a positive attitude that encourages teammates(opens in new tab), and respect for teammates and staff(opens in new tab).
• Game sense (scored on 87%). Lines such as head up, seeing the floor and moving without the ball(opens in new tab) describe it.

Soccer forms come closest to an even split.

• Skill, 31% of criteria, and game sense, 26%. 94% of soccer forms score game sense, under names like decision-making and tactical awareness, and more than half of them (56%) use the words game sense, IQ or awareness.
• Attitude and character, 21% of criteria, scored on 83% of forms. Coachability is named on 39%, behind basketball's 47%, the highest of any sport.
• Physical, 15% of criteria. The word speed or quickness appears on 56% of forms, counting speed of play.
• Weights on 0% of forms. No soccer form in the set gives its criteria different weights.

What Soccer Recruiters Say They Value

A 2017 study by Paul Larkin and Donna O'Connor in PLOS ONE(opens in new tab) asked 20 Australian regional technical directors and coaches which attributes matter when picking Under 13 representative players. First touch, one-v-one ability, striking the ball, coachability, decision-making and a positive attitude were among the attributes rated most important. Speed, strength, agility and short stature were deleted from the list after the first round, and one participant called physical attributes "beneficial, but not essential for performance."

The forms here come from a different setting, mostly school and club teams in North America. Physical criteria make up 15% of an average soccer form, a small share, yet 67% of soccer forms score at least one. The authors name a limit of their own method. Their ratings "may reflect attributes the participants think they should be using rather than attributes they actually use to make a decision."

How to Impress a Soccer Coach at Tryouts, According to the Forms

• Decisions (scored on 94%). The lines read like pass or dribble(opens in new tab), head up, and the transition from offense to defense(opens in new tab).
• Taking instruction (attitude or character scored on 83%, coachability named on 39%). Forms describe it as listening well and understanding instructions(opens in new tab). It shows in the next rep after a coaching point.
• Talking (communication named on 22%). Calling for the ball and organizing teammates(opens in new tab) are the examples forms give.

Hockey forms agree with each other on two lines.

• Game sense scored on all 18 forms, 21% of criteria. Hockey sense, IQ or awareness is named on 83%.
• Attitude or character scored on all 18 forms, 26% of criteria. Competitiveness is named on 67%, far above the next sport, soccer, at 17%.
• Skill, 47% of criteria, such as skating, shooting, passing and puck handling. Speed or quickness is named on 61% of hockey forms, most often inside a skating line.
• Measured test on 0% of forms. That figure alone sets hockey apart. 61% of hockey forms use a rating scale, the second-lowest share, after volleyball's 47%.

Most hockey forms (67%) carry a separate goalie section. We left those out, so the figures describe skaters.

What Hockey Evaluators Watch For on the Ice

Competitiveness is the word to know, named on 67% of hockey forms. One form breaks it down into small-area battles, 50/50 puck races, forechecking and backchecking(opens in new tab). Game sense is on every form, and its lines talk about reading the play(opens in new tab), getting open and supporting the puck carrier(opens in new tab). Effort, hustle or work ethic is named on 61%, and at least one form asks for it in drills as well as scrimmages(opens in new tab), along with attention to the coaches' instruction.

Volleyball forms give attitude and character a bigger share than any other sport.

• Attitude and character, 27% of criteria, scored on 82% of forms.
• Skill, 38% of criteria, spread across hitting, setting, serving, passing, blocking and digging. Footwork is named on 29%.
• Game sense, 6% of criteria. Fewer than half of volleyball forms (47%) score it at all.
• Measured test on 35% of forms, and 47% use a scale. Height and reach come up most often (approach touch, block touch, standing reach(opens in new tab)), next to timed agility runs and push-ups.

Volleyball Tryout Day, Line by Line

• Attitude (the word appears on 65% of forms). Its lines ask for being a positive influence on teammates, listening to coaches and not getting discouraged after a mistake(opens in new tab).
• Calling the ball (communication named on 47%). One form asks players to call for it when passing, hitting and setting(opens in new tab).
• Hustle between drills (effort, hustle or work ethic named on 41%). At least one template scores shagging(opens in new tab), and another counts running to shag balls(opens in new tab) as part of hustle.

Baseball and softball forms are the most skill-heavy in the set.

• Skill, 59% of criteria, such as fielding grounders and flies, throwing, hitting and base running.
• Physical, 20% of criteria, the most of any sport, with speed or quickness named on 72% of forms. That word count includes bat speed and arm speed as well as running speed.
• Game sense, 3% of criteria, scored on 28% of forms.
• Measured test on 39% of forms, and a rating scale on 72%.

Attitude is lighter here. Half of baseball and softball forms (50%) score any attitude or character trait. In basketball it is 93%, and in hockey every form does. A few lines rate a whole position at once, such as one score for pitching, and 17% of forms give their criteria different weights.

Baseball and Softball Tryout Day: Often a Clock

• Measured tests (named on 39% of forms). Timed runs such as home to first, first to third(opens in new tab) and a 60-yard run(opens in new tab) appear next to speed readings like throwing velocity and exit velocity. One form's scoring sheet notes that a radar gun may be present(opens in new tab).
• Arm strength. Several forms give it a line of its own.
• Attitude and hustle (attitude named on 33%, effort or hustle on 28%). Where these appear, they are sometimes one combined line, such as attitude, focus and hustle(opens in new tab).

29 of the 86 forms come from schools: 9 volleyball, 8 soccer, 8 basketball and 4 baseball or softball. 26 of them are high school forms and 3 are middle school forms. None is hockey. If you are heading to a high school tryout, these figures are the ones published by schools like yours.

• 38% skill and 22% attitude and character on an average school form, with 15% physical and 12% game sense.
• 90% score at least one attitude or character trait, 72% game sense and 69% a physical quality.
• 31% name a measured test, and 52% use a scale.

Read these as school figures only. Publisher and sport travel together in this data. 17 of the 32 club forms are hockey and 14 of the 19 league forms are baseball or softball, so a gap between school and club forms would mostly be a gap between sports. For a high school soccer tryout, the soccer section above is the closer guide, and 8 of its 18 forms come from schools.

A tryout form is a record of what the coaches decided to look at. Being cut is hard to hear, and that record at least gives you something specific to ask about. Ask to see the form, or which of its lines you fell short on, then work on those lines before the next tryout.

Expect the answer to go beyond skill. 81% of forms score some attitude or character trait and 71% score game sense, so the gap may sit in effort, communication or decisions, not only in technique. On the 36% of forms with no scale, there may be no score to show you, so ask which criteria decided it.

Attitude is the most common of these words, on 52% of forms, yet 81% of forms score some attitude or character trait. No single word reaches that many. Forms spread the trait across words such as attitude, effort, discipline, poise or character, depending on the sport and the club.

A form counts here when any of its criteria contains the word. That makes the word search rougher than the categories above, which sort each criterion by what it scores, so the two sets of figures do not have to match.

Among the attitude words, effort, hustle or work ethic follows attitude at 44%. Coachability appears by that name on 36%, and competitiveness on 22%, which is mostly a hockey word.

A form can list criteria without scoring them. 36% of the forms in this set have no scale at all. They describe the process or list what coaches look for, and the decision is left to the evaluators. Across all 86 forms, the scales split like this.

• 29% use a 1-5 scale, the most common named scale.
• 5% use 1-10.
• 28% use another number range or a points total.
• 2% use written levels.

Measured tests are less common than you might expect. Only 23% of forms name one with a unit, such as a time, a count, a speed or a height. Our own guide to tryout drills recommends drills that end in a number, timed ones included. The published forms lean on a coach's judgment far more often, and no hockey form names a test at all.

Weights are rarer still. Only 8% of forms give their criteria different weights. On the rest, every line counts the same, or the form does not say. A handful weight whole parts of the tryout instead, such as the skills session against the scrimmage.

Where the Forms Came From

In October 2026, we searched the public web for tryout and selection forms in five sports: baseball and softball (counted together), basketball, ice hockey, soccer and volleyball. A document qualified when it named the criteria players are evaluated on, with or without a scale. Pages that describe tryouts without listing criteria, vendor templates and duplicates are not in the set.

That left 95 forms. When several organizations publish the same template for the same sport, it counts once, which gives 86 distinct forms. The largest shared template is an evaluation card from Hockey Canada(opens in new tab), found on three sites, Hockey Canada's own included.

• Country: 69 from the United States, 13 from Canada, 3 from India, 1 from Australia.
• Publisher: 29 schools, 32 clubs, 19 leagues, 6 federations.
• Purpose: 69 tryouts, 9 team selections (nearly all by schools or federations), 8 mixed or unclear.

All 95 Forms, With Links

Every form in the set is listed below with a link to the document its publisher put online. The same list is also a downloadable CSV file. It adds each form's purpose and the document's year where one is given. It also shows any template a form shares with other publishers in the same sport, the full URL and the retrieval date. The documents were read on October 11, 2026, so some may have moved since.

What Counted as a Criterion

Each line, list item or scored cell is one criterion. A heading with sub-items is replaced by its sub-items, and every named test is its own criterion. Criteria are counted from every section of a document, not only its first page. Text such as "we look for" counts when it names a basis for selection.

Eligibility items like grades, physicals and fees are not criteria unless the form scores them or names them as a basis for selection. Total lines are left out. So are separate goalkeeper sections, found on 16% of forms. A skill repeated inside one form, across age groups, sessions, stations or evaluators, counts once. The same word under two positions or skill areas counts twice. That leaves 1,041 criteria across the 86 forms.

How Reliable the Counts Are

• Reading the forms. Two separate readings of the same form gave an identical category split on 7 of the 10 forms read twice, and always agreed on the scale, weights, tests and goalkeeper section.
• Sorting the criteria. Two separate sortings of every criterion put 95% of them in the same category.
• Uncertain cases. Across all 86 forms, leaving out the borderline criteria moves the category shares by 3 percentage points or less, and their order stays the same. The "at least one" figures are more sensitive. They drop by 4 to 10 points, most of all for physical criteria (57% to 47%).

What the Data Leaves Out

• Only published forms. Clubs that keep their forms internal are missing.
• No European forms. Nearly every form in the set is North American.
• Only five sports. Other sports, American football among them, were not searched.
• No college or academy forms. Most forms are school, recreational or travel level, so the question of what Division I coaches look for is outside this data.
• Separate scoring files. Scoring sheets kept in a separate linked file are mostly not counted.
• A form is a record, not the decision. It shows what a club writes down before tryouts. It does not show how coaches weigh each line on the day.

If you run tryouts yourself, the data shows three things many forms leave unsaid. A scale is missing on 36% of them. Only 8% state weights. And 81% score attitude, under names that change from form to form.

Each of those is a choice you can make on purpose. Write the scale down with a sentence for each level, say whether the scrimmage counts more than the drills, and tell players before day one which attitude lines you score. For a sheet in your sport to start from, each of these rates players 1 to 5.

• Basketball tryout evaluation form, which scores guards, wings and posts on their own lines.
• Soccer tryout evaluation form, six fundamentals with a written definition for every level, game intelligence among them.
• Hockey evaluation form, which includes a printable tryout sheet for six areas.
• Volleyball tryout evaluation form, six areas with a rubric for each rating.
• Baseball tryout evaluation form, six categories, with pitching and catching split into their own sub-skills.
• Softball tryout evaluation form, the same six-category layout with separate pitcher and catcher sections.

In Striveon, the skills you score sit in a skill set, and you can write what each rating level means for the whole skill set. Once you have written those criteria, you can keep them open while you rate a group skill by skill. Each published evaluation goes to the player's Evaluations tab, and when you rate a returning player again, their row shows the level they had before. The same player record also holds their goals, and your drills and season plans work on the same skill sets.