Evaluation Enhancement
Baseball and Softball Assessments
SkillShark and uHIT
March 1, 2022
Information-Enabled Evaluation in Youth Sports
Trends and Importance of Data Transparency
Case Study for Youth Evaluations: Little League Team Placements
In Winter 2022, a prominent baseball training facility in British Columbia came to uHIT with the goal of using the Assessment from its uHIT Custom Training program to place little leaguers on various teams across their league. This training facility is regularly asked by little leagues in and around the Vancouver area to run skill evaluations for giving recommendations on how to distribute talent around a league. This helps little leagues have more competition within the teams, and overall it makes play more fun for the players, the parents and the coaches.
The uHIT Assessment provided point values (in XP) for players’ skills in Zone Recognition and Pitch Recognition. With these measurements from uHIT, the little leagues players were measured on skills easily tracked in a program like SkillShark’s, such as:
- Bat Speed
- Mechanics
- Contact
- Speed
Combining these physical and mental measurements, this premier training facility is able to offer little leagues a precise tool for evaluating players. The end result is a league with an even distribution of talent, making hitting, pitching and overall gameplay more fun for everyone. No longer does one team dominate the league because they stacked their team with recruits. No longer does one team end up being like the Bad News Bears and get dominated by all the other teams.
Instead, integrating data evaluation across all aspects of a player’s performance allows the little leagues that come to this training facility in British Columbia to make talent equally distributed, and fun maximized for everyone. With a tool like uHIT’s Assessments for cognitive evaluation of hitting, and a tool like SkillShark for organizing uHIT and other measurements of a player’s ability, any training facility has all the tools it needs to provide an easy solution to a hard problem for any league.
Watch Our How-To Series
This 8-part series of 5-min videos lets you explore how best to do player evaluations with Skill Shark and uHIT, together. Learn about it right from first-hand experience with running the best player evaluation experiences, for players, coaches and parents!
CEOs of Skill Shark and uHIT get together in this series to discuss ways that player evaluations can sometimes be difficult, without the right tools. Learn from their great stories about ways that technology is making player evaluation easy and effective, both for talent placement and for player development.
Explain Team Placement To Parents
One of the greatest challenges for leagues is to explain team placement to parents. A league director told uHIT recently at the American Baseball Coaches Association meeting in Chicago recently, “I use the data from evaluations to explain to parents why their child was placed on a particular team.” This league director went on to explain that parents don’t always understand why their child was placed on this team or that team. And team placement can many times affect playing time, which is very important for parents of players, as well as the players themselves.
This league director spoke to the need for easy tools like SkillShark for collecting all the measurements needed for player evaluation. And he spoke further to the need to point to numbers like the uHIT Assessment can only provide on a player’s decision-making at the plate. He said about these tools, “this helps me educate parents about why their child ended up on one team or another. And I try to explain to them that this helps their son or daughter get more playing time.”
To learn more about using SkillShark for your player evaluations, follow this link:
To learn more about adding uHIT Custom Assessments to player evaluations, follow these links to connect with Baseball and Softball Specialists at uHIT: