[thumpferee]

Unfortunately favoritism exists in youth sports and is not likely to change any time soon due to the fact that the only ones who volunteer to coach are the parents of the athletes.

I am a 4 year official and have a son who is twelve who played lil' league this year. A tryout was held to chose an All Star team to compete in a European Little League Tournament with World Series hopes. I called games for them during the season and was asked, as well as several other parents, to help with the tryouts and be an evaluator.

Fortunately my son was probably one of the top 5 players in the league, so there were no worries of him not making the team. But anyway, I came up with a way to evaluate players even though parents were doing the evaluating.

We lined up the athletes who were trying out and had them start counting 1,2,3 etc. They were told to remember their number. On our evaluation sheet, it showed...batting, fly balls, ground balls. Under each were numbers with very good, good, average, poor. Here's an example.

Batting Ground Balls Fly Balls

1. Excellent Excellent
Above Average etc
Average
Poor

Comments:_________________________________________ _____

2. ETC....


We then seperated them into groups for infielding and outfielding. Once we as evaluators saw all of them field grounders and throw to first from short, we switched and saw them all catch fly balls, then we watched them all hit.
As they went out to their position to perform the different drills, we asked them their number. Obviously as an evaluator, you know your own son's number, but not the others. Even if you as a parent gave high marks for your son, it may not be reflected in the other evaluators chart as they evaluate the same drills. At the end we all got together and made the cut based on our evals.