This one is for the coaches, and I am writing it as one of you. I run tryouts. I evaluate players. I have made mistakes doing it. So take this in the spirit it is intended: as a lesson we can all learn from, not a callout of anyone.
Here is the scene. A talented young player walks into a high school tryout. Passing is one of the strongest parts of her game. Early in the session, a coach walks over and gives her a significant technical instruction: move back about four feet and pass in a completely different way than she has ever passed. She tries to do it, on the spot, while being evaluated. And her passing falls apart. She is then judged on that broken version of a skill that, minutes earlier, was one of her best.
No one meant any harm. The coach was almost certainly trying to help, maybe even trying to see how coachable she was. But the result was a catastrophe for that player’s evaluation, and it is a trap a lot of well-meaning coaches fall into. Let me break down exactly why it backfires, and what to do instead.
Catastrophe #1: You destroy the motor pattern you’re trying to measure
Dr. Gabriele Wulf’s research on attentional focus is some of the clearest work in all of motor learning. The finding, in plain terms: when a skilled athlete focuses internally on their own body mechanics, performance degrades. When they focus externally on the intended effect, movement becomes more automatic and performs better. She calls the mechanism the constrained action hypothesis — conscious control of a movement literally “freezes” the automatic systems that normally run it.
The moment you hand a skilled player a big technical change, you force them into internal focus. You take an automatic skill and make it conscious. And conscious control is exactly what breaks skilled movement.
So when you tell a strong passer to move four feet and rebuild her technique mid-tryout, you are not testing her passing. You are testing how she performs a brand-new, half-formed motor pattern under maximum pressure. That is a different, much harder task, and it tells you almost nothing about the player she actually is. You have engineered a weakness and are now measuring it.
The players who suffer most from this are often your most coachable ones, because they are the ones who actually try to apply your cue in real time. The kid who ignores you may pass better in that moment, not because she is better, but because she stayed out of her own head.
Catastrophe #2: You crush confidence at the worst possible moment
Even if the motor science did not exist, there is a second problem. A tryout is one of the most anxious environments an athlete ever enters. Their nervous system is already running hot. Then a coach they do not know walks up and, without context, starts overhauling a core skill.
The unspoken message the player hears is not “here’s a helpful tip.” It is “the way you do this is wrong.” Right at the moment they most need to feel steady and confident, you have introduced doubt about something they used to trust completely. Now they are passing while thinking, and worrying, and pressing. Confidence and conscious doubt cannot occupy the same rep.
You will see this ripple outward, too. A player who gets rattled on passing often carries it into their serving, their movement, their body language for the next twenty minutes. One piece of poorly-timed feedback can tank an entire tryout.
Catastrophe #3: You can no longer evaluate fairly
Put the first two together and you arrive at the real cost: you have lost the ability to evaluate that player fairly. You are no longer seeing their true baseline. You are seeing a rattled athlete performing an unfamiliar movement under stress. Whatever you write on your evaluation sheet is now measuring your intervention, not their ability.
Multiply that across a gym full of players and a tryout can produce a distorted picture, where the athletes who happened to get “helped” look worse than the ones you left alone. That is not a fair or accurate selection process, and it is the opposite of what a tryout is supposed to do.
What to do instead
None of this means you turn your brain off and say nothing. It means you change what you give, and when.
- During tryouts, evaluate — don’t reconstruct. Let players show you who they are right now. Watch their real, automatic skills. That baseline is the whole point of the tryout.
- If you must cue, keep it external and simple. “Drive the ball to the setter” or “Watch the bottom of the ball” keeps a player automatic. “Pull your arms / platform up and you’re your legs more” drops them into internal focus. When in doubt, cue the outcome, not the body part.
- Save technical rebuilds for training. If a player genuinely needs to move four feet and change her passing, that is a coaching project for the season, taught deliberately over weeks in low-pressure reps until it becomes automatic. It is not a tryout note.
- If you do intervene, frame it and protect the player. If you truly want to test learning, say so: “I’m going to give you something new — I just want to see how you take to it, not whether you nail it.” That single sentence removes the judgment and the confidence hit. Silence plus correction reads as criticism.
- Judge the athlete, not the ambush. If you did change something on a player, account for it. Don’t score them on a skill you just destabilized. Ask yourself whether you’re evaluating their ability or your own intervention.
The four stages, and why timing matters
There is a place for internal cues. In the early stages of learning — when a player is first understanding a movement — internal cues can actually help them grasp what to do with their body. Our goal in those early stages is for the player to understand the skill and perform it consciously. But once a skill is automatic, which is the unconscious competence stage, external focus is always better. Reading the game, slowing the ball down, dealing with pressure — that is stage-four territory, and it lives entirely in an external focus.
A tryout is full of stage-four athletes performing automatic skills under pressure. Reaching in with an internal, technical rebuild drags them backward into conscious control at the exact moment they need to be automatic. Right principle, catastrophically wrong time.
The takeaway
Tryouts are for seeing players clearly. Every piece of technical feedback you hand out during one has a cost: it can break a motor pattern, shake a young athlete’s confidence, and blur the very evaluation you are trying to make. The best tryout coaches I know talk less and watch more. They save their teaching for the season, they keep any in-the-moment cues external and light, and above all they make sure they are judging the player in front of them, not the version of that player they just disrupted.
“Read the game, slow the game, and eliminate pressure!” — Andor Gyulai
For the full science on cueing and attentional focus, read: Internal vs. External Feedback — and the Mistake Coaches Don’t Realize They’re Making.
