Roth Regatta

Anonymous coaching evaluations are very helpful to your league. They can help you pinpoint weak spots on your coaching roster, as well as highlight areas where you need to do more training. Plus, they give parents a way to give honest input.

You can pass out paper forms for all parents to fill out if you want. But then you need to collect them all and have someone go through them an organize them. Thankfully, the web gives us a better way. Google Docs, specifically.

Google Docs is an online

word processor. One of the things you can do with it is to create a form. You can then email that form to your parents or post it on a website for parents to visit. In fact, you should do both.

If you already have a Gmail account, you are just a step away from being able to set up your online coach evaluation form. If you don’t have a Gmail account, its still pretty simple. First, you need to go to docs.google.com. If you have a Google or Gmail account, simply fill in your username and passw

ord. If not, click on Get Started and create your free account.

After you sign on, you will be brought to a page that will eventually show all of your documents. You may get some kind of welcome message if you are going there for the first time.

To create an evaluation form, simply click on New and then on Form. You will be brought to a screen where you can edit and add questions. You can include questions where respondents have to type in responses, questions that are simply yes or no, and

even questions where respondents answer based on a scale. Create you questions and add a title and description to the form. If you want to keep your 0nline coach evaluation anonymous, do not ask for names or identification of any kind. Just be sure to include a place where the coaches name can be selected or typed in.

You can send your form right away from the form editor screen, but chances are you will want to send it later or put it up on a website. So, save your work and exit. The next time you log in to Google Docs, you will see your form in the list of documents. When you open it up, you may be surprised. It no longer looks like a form. Instead, you have a spreadsheet. Don’t panic, this is supposed to happen.

If you want to go back to edit or see your form, simply click on Form and then Edit Form. This is the same place you go to send the form or to embed it on a website as well. If you are going to be emailing the form directly to your league parents, put a good description on the form so the parent will understand what they are supposed to do.

Back to the spreadsheet for a moment. This is where all the answers will be collected from the evaluation. Once you have them all, you can easily export to Excel and sort by coach. To export the spreadsheet, just go to File and then Export. This will make it much easier to keep track of feedback and spot trends and look at an individual coach’s performance.

Its pretty simple to set up and use an online coach evaluation form. It may take a few minutes for you to get comfortable with setting this up and running it yourself, but once you do, you will save lots of work (and paper).