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Sports league commissioners, directors and coaches have to assign players to teams . While most sports leagues are dedicated to fun and learning, sports by their nature are competitive and winning is more fun than losing. A good director needs to manage the competitiveness of parents and coaches and assign teams in a fair, objective manner.There a few ways to select teams:

• The Buddy System: Attempt to balance skill/talent level with friend requests of players and coaches. One drawback is that better players tend to become friends and/or their parents influence those requests in order to stock a team with talent.

• Autocratic: The league director assigns players to teams based on their personal knowledge. This method can be the quickest if the director knows the players’ skill levels. However, it usually leaves every team a little unhappy and is seen as very subjective. Expect a lot of requests after the fact.

• The Draft: By far the most competitive, time-consuming choice but also the most fair and objective. Each coach has the responsibility to pick their team based on their own criteria. Drafts can also be the most fun if done correctly.

Now, the mere mention of being part of a draft is enough to make some coaches drool with delusions of pro sports grandeur. Specifically, Type A personalities, NFL Football Fans, would be General Managers, and Fantasy league flunkies. It really doesn’t matter that the players being drafted are only four foot tall, 3rd Grade boys or girls who have never touched a basketball in their life—coaches get to pick their own teams. I have heard horror stories of Little League drafts taking 5-6 hours with a lot of debating and arguing. Our draft was a great success and a lot of fun. This post is for those coaches and commissioners looking to improve the way they pick teams.

Draft Preparation: Evaluations, Ratings, Rankings

In the past, our basketball league rated players on a 1 to 4 scale. Before the actual draft, coaches would then discuss and debate each kids rating and vote on it. This took way too long– a couple hours for 120 kids–just to give them a rating.

Tip #1- Use a spreadsheet. While it might not seem like cutting edge advice, many leagues are still operating on paper.

1. Simplify the ratings and make sure coaches know what each rating means.

1. Each coach submits their ratings for as many players as they can evaluate and submits their da ta to a collective spreadsheet.
2. All player ratings are then averaged in the spreadsheet. Since each coach/team gets equal weighting the ratings are much more objective vs. loudest coach wins.

Under the old system, players would be grouped in their rating buckets- 30 players rated a “1″, etc. Usually there is a large gap between the top player in the league and the 30th. Now that you are automated with a spreadsheet, your coaches will have two new quantitative metrics by which to judge all players and decide their picks: Average Rating Per Player and Player Rank.

Player Rank is useful for assigning players to a draft round and for accounting for the talent level of coach’s kids. In the example to the left, we have a ten-team league, Players A-J represent the top ten kids and should be first round picks.

If a coach’s kid (Player AA) is Ranked #42 then that player is assigned as a 4th round pick. That would give that team a 1st, 2nd, 3rd round pick before selecting the coach’s kid in the 4th round.

Player A is the highest rated player but came late to tryouts and was only evaluated by one coach. Is that player the consensus #1? I doubt it but that is the way it goes in youth sports. Player B is probably the better pick as 11/12 coaches gave a 1 rating.

In addition to coach evaluation you can add other player metrics like speed, height, age, etc in determining picks and balancing the draft.

Draft Day:

Which teams picks first? You can draw straws, numbers or use Draft Order to run an NBA style lottery to pick the draft order. We had a coaches meeting at a restaurant in town prior to the draft and I ran Draft Order on my laptop so everyone could see how picks were distributed.

Setup: Spreadsheets are good for analyzing lists but aren’t too exciting to use during a draft. I researched and tested five software packages to find the right tool to use for draft day. I chose FanDraft, a draft presentation software designed to run Fantasy Football league drafts. I emailed Randy, the owner/developer of the software, and told him I was looking to use his software but wanted to replace the NFL player information with our player data. He had been working on a solution for Little Leagues so I agreed to beta test the product for our basketball league. It worked great.

Fandraft walks you through draft setup, team setup and player setup in a very simple interface. With very little effort I was able to import the players names, ages and ranks into Fandraft and we were ready to go.

Venue: Where to hold your draft

FanDraft is designed to project to your TV/projector from a computer. The venue you select will depend on how many people you need to accommodate during the draft. We had 22 coaches join us at the local indoor sports complex lounge which was equipped with big screen TV, plenty of seating, food and adult beverages of choice.

Our goal was to complete the draft in 2 hours–less than half the time of the previous year. With 120 players to pick, coaches only had 60 seconds to make their selection. It seems like plenty of time until you are the one on the clock!

Fandraft made it simple. It shows what team is on the clock, players remaining by rank, current round and pick and what teams are upcoming.

Fandraft also lets you import a playlist of MP3’s so you can have your own music playing during the draft.

Post Draft: FanDraft lets you print and/or export all the picks by team or by round very easily.

Post Season Analysis- The draft process was fair and the teams were given equal opportunity to pick from the best players or their friends. Overall, our league was balanced with most teams near the .500 mark. We did have one team go undefeated and another team not win a game, despite adjusting the schedule in midseason. The disparity was due to the level of coaching experience- both in the draft and on the court.

Let us know about your draft results and experiences. We look forward to seeing your teams on TownConnect!