Your tryout participation numbers are through the roof. The marketing and recruiting efforts by your Director and Coaches have paid off. Now it is essential that you organize the 2-3 hours of your tryout as efficiently as possible to guarantee a fair evaluation of each player. KIVA, located in one of the largest junior volleyball hotbeds in the country shares how the club structures it’s tryouts to ensure that each player has the opportunity to adequately display her skills and coaches can efficiently evaluate every player in order to make confident decisions when selecting their teams.

Below is KIVA’s tryout plan, a breakdown of the schedule, what they look for at tryouts, and how they make the tough decisions.

Tryout Plan:

  • We split kids up into groups of 10-15 per court with at least 2 coaches per court.
  • Based on numbers in the group we typically use 4 courts and try to keep 20 kids on a court.
  • We rotate the kids from court to court and have ONE COURT as an EVALUATION COURT
    • This ensures everyone is looked at for the same amount of time
    • We ALWAYS keep under 20 on the evaluation court.
    • More than that is too difficult to effectively evaluate kids.
    • Evaluation court has 3 coaches to ensure efficiency and drill accuracy.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE TRYOUT PLAN: The skills listed on this plan are what we go through at tryouts

Tryout Schedule:

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE TRYOUT SCHEDULE: This is a break down of what age groups tryout when and how many times for the 14 and Under Age Groups


Highlights of What Coaches Look for at Tryouts:

  • Athleticism- height, approach touch, block touch, etc.
  • Skill Set
  • Multiple Skill Set- meaning can this athlete do more than one thing? For example: pass and set? Swing and pass?
  • Leadership & Communication
  • Work Ethic / Energy


How Coaches Evaluate:

Coaches of that age group evaluate with clipboards and an excel breakdown with player names and numbers. Every athlete is given a KIVA Tryout Shirt that has a number on it. They wear this same shirt to all the tryouts so we can identify each athlete by that number.

Final decisions are made through discussions with the coaches of that age group  and Club Director Ron Kordes along with Associate Club Directors Anne Kordes, Courtney Robison and Melissa Stark-Bean.

View more education with sample tryout schedules and forms.

KIVA (Louisville, KY) is a founding member club of the JVA. KIVA website.