The National Alliance for Youth Sports’ (NAYS) Rate Your Coach program has helped improve children’s experiences in youth sports leagues across the country. With this online tool, NAYS Chapters ask parents to evaluate their child’s NYSCA coach in several key areas, like teaching sportsmanship and skills, running practices and communicating with parents. To date, nearly 10,000 evaluations have been submitted by parents’ anonymous, honest feedback.

NAYS is excited to release a major update to the Rate Your Coach program to help parents better evaluate their child’s coach, give leagues a clearer picture of what’s happening on their fields and provide coaches with feedback to identify and correct any problems – as well as receive a pat on the back for doing great work!

Updates to the Rate Your Coach program include:

• A new, improved rating scale for parents to evaluate their child’s coach by.
• Questions grouped into the categories of Sportsmanship, Physical Health, Sport Knowledge and Technical Instruction, Communication and Coaching Style.
• Open response comment boxes that give parents the option to provide the league and/or coach with additional feedback.
• NAYS Chapter Directors and their youth sports staff can now view and print a summation of an individual coach’s evaluations. The summation is accessed through the “Rate Your Coach Results” feature in Chapter Management at www.nays.org and can be a tool for coach selection or to develop an improvement plan.

Coach training is an essential part of creating a fun, safe playing environment for youth athletes – but coaching education doesn’t stop at the end of a NYSCA clinic. Part of being a great coach is the willingness to improve each season, and the feedback from Rate Your Coach helps NYSCA coaches do just that.

Rate Your Coach is an exclusive benefit for NAYS members. To learn how Rate Your Coach can work for you, contact NAYS at (800) 688-KIDS (5437).