Tryouts, day 2The worst part about tryouts is the feared and dreaded Cascading Evaluation. What this type of evaluation does is bring in about 6 skaters at every half hour increment. Once on, you are grouped and you play a series of minigames. As you play, you are constantly being "traded" around as evaluators attempt to put you in like skill groups.
But it's brutal.
Sometimes, evaluators don't get a chance to get a good look at you so you stay on the ice and play. Or it could be that they just don't know about a kid and want to pass him down to another evaluator to look at. The kid is just supposed to play where he's asked. From the kids perspective, its chaos. At the end of it, Ryan was on the ice for two hours, and he was bagged. Just barely enough gas in the tank for a birthday party he was to attend later on that day.
My strategy was this: downplay this tryout. We knew that this would be the major part, and performance would dictate which division. Not that we want him to strive for mediocrity, we just want him in a lower division so that he can get some puck confidence, maybe score a few, maybe learn a bit more about the flow of play, know what I'm saying?
Throughout all this, he still is having fun: lots of friends, super cool volunteers, and a chance to show some independance. If only it weren't so damned expensive!
Evaluation session number 3 goes Tuesday night.
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