Evaluating a Student or Athlete is like Cubist Art

We just finished camps and what is lovingly (Hah!) referred to as ‘Hell Week’ here this past Sunday.  As a college coach, any time you have high school-aged athletes in your gym, you are constantly evaluating their ability and whether they can compete for your program.  For me at a two-year school, I’m also judging athletes on whether they could play on after their time at LLCC.  So as part of this, we did a Prospect Clinic where we had ten different college coaches involved evaluating athletes.

When it is all done, I took the grades from the coaches, averaged them, and sent them onwards to the athletes so they had an evaluation of their abilities done by college coaches–something they could use in terms of their own recruiting efforts to find programs.  While totaling things, I was shocked by some of the different ratings.

This is where cubism came to mind.  As an art form, cubism is about breaking something down and looking at it from multiple perspectives and then reassembling it into a new interpretation of the object/person–that’s a simple definition; the Wikipedia link does a better job of explaining it in detail (and it’s worth jumping down the rabbit hole simply for the sake of learning).

From the clinic, there was one passer who I watched several times and graded out as ‘below average’.  This was in contrast to *every* other coach there who had her at ‘above average’ or ‘superior’.  I kept going back to watch her and…kept concluding my grade was right–even though I completely trust the evaluation skills of the other coaches there!  You see the problem of course–it’s a small sample size, a brief moment of time.  Which is the TRUE version of that player?  How much do you need to watch until you see the true version of the athlete, who he is right now, who she will become in 1/2/3/4 years of time in your program?

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The above is about coaching, but it holds true beyond practice and recruiting.  It goes to the classroom as well.  Is a student’s grade on a test representative of their thinking skills?–or did she have a bad day? Does he struggle with essay tests but really does know the information?

I think this is where I worry–and it goes back to my previous blog on why I coach.  If we make snap judgments about a young person, we can do a lot of harm.  We don’t necessarily see all perspectives on a person.  Parents think they know everything about their darling daughter, teachers/coaches make judgments based on an hour of class, two hours of practice, or gossip from other teachers.  All of those are true, yet all are false.

Consider that when dealing with young people.  Work to do no harm.  Consider the possibility that what you see is a partial truth or maybe incorrect–but don’t forget that you could be right, too!

As for that kid I evaluated ‘below average’??  I won’t take her off my radar.  I don’t particularly like looking at cubist art, but I think the idea behind it is spot on.