A season review takes about twenty minutes and needs three things: one comparison, three questions, and two sentences written down somewhere you’ll actually find them next season.
The comparison is your kid’s first four games against their last four. The questions get asked at the kitchen bench, not in the car. The two sentences are what you both want to be different next year.
It works whether you recorded every game or none of them, and the version for parents who tracked nothing is more useful than no review at all, so start there if that’s you.
What a season review is actually for
Nobody needs to grade an eleven-year-old’s winter. The point is to pin down what changed while the evidence still exists.
By March you’ll remember two things about this season: the best game and the worst umpire. Twelve rounds of steady, unglamorous improvement will have quietly evaporated.
Your kid can’t see it either. Kids measure themselves against the best player on the team, today. Nobody measures themselves against who they were in April on their own. Somebody has to point at the two ends and show them the gap.
The three questions worth asking your kid
Ask about a week after the last game. If it ended badly, give it longer.
- “What can you do now that you couldn’t do in the first game?” They will say “dunno”. Wait. If the silence gets long, prime it with something you noticed, then let them take it over.
- “What was the best thing that happened this year?” It’s almost never a goal. Usually a moment, and often one you didn’t see. Let it be whatever it is, even if it’s the bus trip to the carnival.
- “What do you want to be better at next year?” Their answer, not yours. Write it in their words, including the wrong words.
Three questions is the whole list. If you find yourself on question seven, you’ve stopped reviewing and started coaching.
How to do this if you tracked nothing all season
This is most parents. You have more than you think.
Your camera roll, sorted by date. Open the first game and the last game side by side. Look at where they’re standing when the ball is somewhere else, and who they’re standing next to. You’ll see things you didn’t notice live.
The team group chat. Scroll back to April. Match reports, scores, team lists, the week they got moved into the ruck. It’s a season diary written by twenty-two people who didn’t know they were writing one.
Your own memory, but only against a prompt. “How did he play this year” gets you nothing. “What was he doing in round two that he’d stopped doing by round ten” gets you an answer.
That gives you a story rather than numbers, and the story is what the conversation runs on. What it won’t tell you is whether his disposals, every time he touched the ball by kick or handball, went up or down. Nothing reconstructs that after the fact.
How to do this if you did track: what to look at, what to ignore
Look at disposals, because volume is where junior improvement shows up first. Tackles and contested involvements, because effort stats move earliest, often a month before anything else does. Game time, because it’s the context for every other number on the page.
Ignore goals, which are mostly a story about position and who else is on the field. Any single game, which tells you about the weather. And the season average, which sits in the middle of the range and hides the exact thing you’re looking for.
As for recording it in the first place, three options work. A notes app is free and perfectly good, as long as you remember to open it. A paper tally on the back of the fixture works beautifully and then goes through the wash. A stats app does the counting and the remembering for you.
ScorX is the third kind. You tap what you see while the game is running, and it keeps a game-by-game record for that player, so in September you open one screen and see the shape of the season instead of trying to recall it. The free version covers one player in one sport and the data stays on your phone.
The one comparison that matters: first four games against last four
Not round by round. Junior game-to-game variation is enormous, and one game tells you about the ground conditions. Four games starts to tell you about the kid. The season average is no better, because you want the difference between the two ends, not the middle.
Add up the first four, add up the last four, and put them next to each other.
What counts as real is a change you’d notice without squinting. Nine disposals a game going to eleven is noise. Nine going to sixteen is a different player.
If the numbers went sideways or backwards, slow down before you read anything into it. Moving up an age group flattens everything for about six weeks. So does a position change, a coach who started rotating them through the midfield, and a growth spurt that arrived in July. Write down what changed around them first, then decide what the numbers mean.
What to write down so next season starts somewhere
Two sentences. One in their words, one in yours.
Ollie: “I want to get better at kicking with my left.” Me: he stopped hiding at the back of packs around round six. Keep that going.
Put it in your notes app and pin it, or on the front page of next year’s fixture. Somewhere you’ll find it in 5 months, which is not a piece of paper in the kitchen drawer. The best option is log it as a development goal in an app like ScorX.
The payoff comes at the first training session next season, when they ask what they should be working on and you have an answer that came out of their own mouth five months ago. Much better than the one you make up in the car park.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you review a junior sport season with your child?
Set aside twenty minutes about a week after the last game, once the result has stopped stinging. Do three things. Compare their first four games to their last four, using whatever you have, which is recorded stats if you tracked them and photos and match reports if you didn’t. Ask three questions. What can you do now that you couldn’t do in the first game? What was the best thing that happened? What do you want to be better at next year? Then write two sentences down, one in their words and one in yours, and put them somewhere you’ll find them when pre-season starts.
How long should a season review take?
Twenty minutes. If it’s stretched to an hour it has turned into a performance review, and an eleven-year-old doesn’t need one of those.
What if my kid doesn’t want to talk about it?
Leave it a fortnight and try again sideways, in the car on the way to something that has nothing to do with footy. If they still don’t want to, do your half on your own and keep the note. The conversation can happen in February.
Should I show my kid their stats?
Show them the two ends, unless they are keen on the detail. “Round two you had nine touches, round twelve you had sixteen” lands. A full table doesn’t, and it invites them to compare their numbers to their teammates’, which is the one thing a season review should never turn into.
ScorX is free to download. If this year’s review came up thinner than you’d like, round 1 is where that gets fixed.
Related Sideline Blogs
- 7 AFL Stats That Matter for Junior Development, And 3 That Don’t — If you’re deciding what to record next season, start with the shortlist rather than tracking everything.
- Why Your Child’s Sports Stats Look Different from Game to Game — The reason blocks of four games tell you the truth and single games don’t.
- When Should Your Kid Start a Development Plan? — What to do with those two sentences once you’ve written them down.