Session 3: Team assessments
With competitive juices flowing, the boys put in their best effort to measure where they are today with three physical tests.
On Saturday, we spent the latter half of practice taking physical assessments with the team. We focused on three skill events to measure speed, explosive power, and rotational power. As shared in earlier posts, these three events are easy to measure and can set a baseline for our 13U players as they begin their strength training journey with minimal equipment required for testing.
Although the competition is fun, the most important takeaway from these skill tests is how each boy improves over time. The critical thing is that they put in the work in their own time, and the impact of their efforts will manifest during the tests. (Some will also catch up with puberty; you could imagine some numbers shooting up with it!)
Events
20-yard dash
Medicine ball shotput
Standing broad jump
Equipment
Stopwatch (iPhone clock app)
Mini cones (to mark 20-yard dash start/mid/end points)
The links above are the products I used for testing; they are also affiliate links with Amazon, and I may get a commission on purchases.
Doing the tests as a team worked well in several ways:
The boys were focused on the drills as they were competitive and wanted to see what their numbers and their teammate’s numbers looked like.
They took each attempt seriously for all events and gave it all they had.
They had a lot of fun doing it together as a team.
The data had some outliers; knowing that was possible, we took three measurements for each drill. As we do these assessments a few more times, their numbers should normalize, and we will have a clearer picture of where each boy is.
The technique used for each drill does come into play, especially with the medicine ball throws. There will be somewhat of a learning curve as the boys master optimal form for each assessment, and their results should also begin to normalize on that front.
Note: I ran additional tests using a Pocket Radar (#ad) earlier to see if capturing the speed of a medicine ball shotput throw was possible, but throws were not fast enough to register with that device. That is why we are sticking with distance for the drill instead of speed. In the future, it may be possible to switch to measuring the exit velocity of these throws.