How to Structure Eval Sessions by Roster Size

The single biggest factor in evaluation quality is how many players are on the floor at once. Too many and your evaluators cannot track individuals. Too few and you are wasting rink time.

The 30-40 player rule. A single evaluation session should have no more than 30 to 40 players. This gives each evaluator a manageable number of players to track, keeps drill rotations moving, and ensures every kid gets seen.

If you have more than 40 players, split them into multiple sessions. Here is how to think about it:

• 50 players: 2 sessions of 25.
• 80 players: 2 sessions of 40 or 3 sessions of 27.
• 120 players: 3 sessions of 40 or 4 sessions of 30.
• 150 players: 4 sessions of 38 or 5 sessions of 30.

Sessions can run back to back on the same day if you have the rink time. A 60-minute eval session with 30 players is more productive than a 90-minute session with 60 players. The math is counterintuitive but the results are not.

Splitting by age or division. If your league has multiple divisions or age groups, those are natural session boundaries. Do not mix age groups in one session unless you want your evaluators comparing 8-year-olds to 12-year-olds.

Multiple days work. You do not have to do everything in one night. Spread sessions across two or three days if rink time allows. The evaluation data is better when kids and evaluators are not exhausted.

What happens when you ignore this. We deployed at an organization that tried to evaluate 150 players across two rinks in a single session window. Registration was still open at start time. Check-in had no defined process. Evaluators were overwhelmed. The evaluation data was incomplete. Every one of these problems was caused by session sizing. The app worked. The process did not.

RosterForge will warn you when a session exceeds 40 players. You can proceed, but you will see it.