Softball Tryout Evaluation Form

Each panel evaluator works from a stack of these single-player sheets, one per pinnie number. When you're torn between two numbers, the level wording under the table decides. Before the first rep, fill in how she bats and throws and whether she slaps. A left-handed slapper starts running before she makes contact, which changes what her Hitting and Base Running scores measure.

Adding up every evaluator's scores by hand? The €19 Tryout Decision Kit marks who's on the bubble and drafts a message to every family ↓

• Print Form sends the sheet and its rubric to your printer. Choose Save as PDF as the destination and you get a PDF instead.
• Copy as Table pastes a ten-line roster grid into Excel or a Google Sheet. It suits one coach scoring a small group on a single page.
• Download as Image turns the single-player sheet into a PNG you can open on a tablet.

Two rules in USA Softball's 2026 Official Rules of Softball(opens in new tab) change what you write on this sheet, and the second of them also sets the pitching distance for each division. A third difference is a batting style. The rule book mentions the slap in its batting and scoring rules and says nothing about how to rate a slapper's skill.

Runners Leave on the Release

Score Base Running on timing. A good runner holds the bag, leaves on the release, and gets back when the catcher looks her way after the pitch. The rule book defines a fast pitch steal in one line. "Runners can advance once the pitched ball leaves the pitcher's hand." Rule 8, Section 7S makes leaving early an out, with the ball dead and no pitch declared. There is no lead-off to judge before the pitch.

Sixty-Foot Bases Make Home to First the Sprint

Time home to first once and write it on the Home to 1B line. She takes a dry swing in the box, or a slapper her slap step, and runs through the bag. Every USA Softball girls' fast pitch division from 10U through 18U plays 60-foot bases (Rule 2, Section 1), and a separate 60-foot sprint would measure the same ground twice.

The Slapper Is Scored on Her Short Game

Give a slapper's Hitting row its number from her slaps and bunts on the ground in fair territory and from the footwork that gets her moving on the release. Mark her down when she leaves early and has to stop to make contact. In the coaching manual Softball Skills & Drills(opens in new tab), Judi Garman and Michelle Gromacki describe the lefty as already "several steps closer to first" and say she starts moving on the release, never before. They add that a slapper needs speed and the ability to put the ball in play.

Her home-to-first starts in the left-side box with a slap step instead of a dry swing, a shorter trip with a running start. Read her time against the other slappers' times, not the right-handed hitters', which is why the Slapper line sits next to it.

Pitching Distance by Division

A pitcher's numbers only mean something at her own distance. USA Softball moves the pitching plate back twice between 10U and 14U, and a pitcher you saw looking sharp last spring may need time to find her strikes at the new distance.

Source: USA Softball, 2026 Official Rules of Softball, Rule 2, Section 1 (girls' fast pitch). The table starts at 10U. For 8U, use the distance your league plays.

Two evaluators in the bullpen score windmill pitchers and their catchers on a separate sheet while the rest of the tryout plays defense. Every row has its own level descriptions.

The 25-Pitch Bullpen Script

You give each pitcher one scripted bullpen. With two lanes, one pitcher throws her script on the first lane while the next one warms up on the second, and the bullpen pair watches only the lane being scored. Every pitcher gets the same order and the same count, which makes her strike rate on pitches 21 to 25 worth comparing.

A 10U pitcher may bring only a fastball and a change-up. She gets N/A on Drop Ball and Rise Ball, and her total is out of 15. A curve or a screwball goes in Notes. Her top speed goes on the header line when a radar gun is on hand and stays out of the total.

The plan assumes five pitcher-catcher pairs. With more pitchers than catchers, you have a catcher take a second script, and the pair scores her on the first one.

Catchers on the Same Script

Each catcher receives her partner's 25 pitches. Her throw-downs to second come later, on the diamond in the battery defense block, where the bullpen pair also times her pop time. The fourth row covers the bullpen as she runs it, calling the last five pitches and talking her pitcher through a miss.

The youth sheet has four rows, each scored 1 to 5, and no position work.

• Catch and Throw is the defense rating.
• Tracks the Pitch asks whether she watches the ball in and stays in the box instead of stepping away.
• Speed to First is one timed run.
• Teammate and Effort is how she treats the player next to her when a drill goes wrong.

The rows follow Little League's advice on three skills to evaluate during player tryouts(opens in new tab), written for baseball and softball managers alike. It rates defense, offense, and speed, and it warns that "the player's swing will be influenced by the environment, the pitcher, and the number of pitches received." Give every young hitter the same pitcher and the same number of pitches. The article also notes that a younger player with speed and quick reflexes is worth drafting, and that enjoying the game and being a good teammate often count for more than physical talent.

Rec League Drafts

A rec draft has no cut. You're spreading talent across teams, aiming for a few players on each who can catch and throw. The youth sheet is enough for that, and one evaluator per age group can run it. Sort the totals, then snake-draft down the list. Pitching distances for 10U and 12U are in the table in the Fastpitch Rules section.

By high school the six-row sheet is the right tool, and two things change in how you fill it. Players come with real positions, and some of them will be recruited.

Two Positions, Both Scored

Ask each player for a first and second position at check-in and write the second on the 2nd Position line. In the defense block she takes her ground balls or fly balls at the first, then two more at the second, and her Fielding score covers both. Pitchers and catchers play their second position in live situations. A shortstop who can also handle third gives your lineup card an option in May that a pure shortstop does not.

Watch how a player handles speed. A hard grounder to the backhand, a bunt she has to charge, and a fly ball she has to go back on are where you see high school defenders separate. How she reacts after an error tells you more about her Character score than any warm-up does.

Measurables Worth Writing Down

You get lines for three numbers on the sheets. Home to 1B sits on the main sheet, and top speed and pop time on the pitching and catching sheet. A position player's throwing speed, when a radar gun is on hand, goes in Notes. For players aiming at college softball, the same numbers feed a profile page for recruiters with her positions, how she bats and throws, and the pitches she owns. Kept season after season, those records show a recruiter a trend rather than a single afternoon.

This plan runs 30 players through 150 minutes on one diamond, two batting cages, and a two-lane bullpen, a realistic size for a high school or 14U club tryout. It uses the same kinds of drills as softball tryout drills, staffed by a panel in place of one coach per station.

Three Evaluators, One Rep

A softball tryout has one diamond, and a scored rep only happens once. The three main evaluators stand together, behind the backstop for hitting and along a baseline for defense and baserunning. A ground ball or a run to first lands on all three sheets at once. No one is assigned a station, and each evaluator scores all six rows for all 30 players.

Our playbook and the drills guide both use the faster format, one coach per station, which fits 30 to 45 players into 90 minutes to two hours. The panel costs you 30 to 60 minutes more. In return, the three scores on each row come from the same rep, and the drills guide's 12-pitch look for pitchers grows here into a 25-pitch script that fills a whole sheet.

Evaluators who stand together talk, and a comment from the head coach can become everyone's number. Score in silence and keep the sheets face down until the compile sheet. When two panel members then end up two points apart on a player's throw, they watched the same throw, and the gap is about how they read the rubric.

Your pitchers and catchers also go through every main-sheet block in front of the panel, with their own battery defense block and their second positions in live situations.

Block Map for Both Sheets

The People You Need

Besides the five evaluators, plan on a fungo hitter for the defense and baserunning blocks, someone to feed the machine during hitting, and a helper in the cages. The bullpen pair doubles as the timers in the baserunning block and runs the machine in live situations, since their sheet is finished by then.

The slapper is where a panel drifts apart, because one evaluator watches her swing and another her feet. The night before, pull up last season's video of one right-handed power hitter and one left-handed slapper. Read the Hitting levels aloud for each, slapper lines included, and settle as a group which level each at-bat matches before the tryout puts 30 real ones in front of you.

After the close, the head coach holds three main sheets per player and two pitching and catching sheets for each member of Group C. Work through them in this order, then fill the compile sheet below on this page or on paper.

1. Settle the splits first. Lay the three panel sheets for a player side by side. If a row's scores spread across two points or more, the panel reads that row's level descriptions together and agrees on one number. Write that row in Split row.
2. Average the rows to one decimal, using the settled number where there was a split, and add the six averages into the Total out of 30.
3. Add the battery number for pitchers and catchers. P/C avg is the bullpen pair's average per scored row on the pitching and catching sheet, out of 5. A pitcher without a rise ball is not pulled down by it.
4. Draw the line. Sort by Total and count down to your roster spots. Then check the line against the header. If you need three pitchers and only two are above it, the best P/C avg below the line moves up. The same goes for catchers.
5. Mark the call. Make for the clear picks, Cut for the clear misses, and Maybe for anyone within two points of the line. The two-point band is our choice, not a standard. The Maybes get your meeting time, with the notes and the split rows on the table.
6. Mark the next level for each Cut. On her lowest row, circle the level description one step above her average. A slapper who averaged 2.3 in Hitting gets level 3 circled, "most slaps on the ground in fair territory," and the conversation about next year starts from those words.

With the roster set, the softball roster template holds the names, positions, and contact details for the season.

The tryout sheet gives you one Hitting number. This framework hands you six hitting sub-skills, bunting and slap hitting among them, and does the same for windmill pitching, fielding, baserunning, throwing, and game sense. That finer split shows which part of her hitting lags behind, the bunt or the slap.

Try It on a Player You Coached Last Season

Picture a player you know well and work through her six areas in turn. Marks run from 1 to 10, finer than the tryout's 1 to 5, because a season of practice moves a player in steps too small for a five-point sheet. The profile below the scorer redraws after each mark. The page forgets everything on reload. Copy the marks to a spreadsheet or save the card as an image to keep her profile.

Setting It Up in Striveon

We adapted this framework for fastpitch from Striveon's baseball skill sets, since the app has no softball set of its own and a new softball account starts from three general skill areas. You add these six yourself. On the Skill Sets tab, the + button beside the Skill Sets heading adds an area, and its sub-skills go inside its card. Rename or add sub-skills whenever your program changes. Deleting a sub-skill also deletes every rating already given for it, for every player, and removes it from any goal that targets it.

The numbers in the live scorer carry no definitions. In the app, each skill set's card has an Evaluation Criteria button for levels that apply to that area alone, and the Evaluation Criteria tab holds the general levels for every skill in your organization. Write Windmill Pitching's own levels from its card, and your pitching coach and your head coach grade a drop ball against the same words.

Keep tryout day on paper, averages included. After the cut, one coach enters a baseline for the new roster. The Evaluate players button above your player list starts it. Choose who is being evaluated, rate each skill in whole numbers on the app's scale (1 to 10 by default), and finish with Publish evaluations. Rate from the compile sheet and your notes. A 3.7 out of 5 has no exact place on a 1-to-10 scale, and a judgment call beats a conversion.

• Published evaluations can't be edited. Publishing also emails your other coaches and each rated player with a login of her own, unless they've turned evaluation emails off.
• Use one round from one coach. Every published round is a separate evaluation on each player's timeline, and three evaluators publishing three rounds would turn their disagreement into a rise or a fall on her chart.