The five pillars, explained for parents

T.A.P.E.S. stands for Technical, Athletic, Psychological, Educational and Social: five separate assessments of the same player.

Most football assessment covers the first two. Technical is what a player does with the ball: first touch on both feet, control in a tight space, whether they look up before they receive. Athletic is what the body does: speed over five and ten metres, changing direction to the left as well as the right, jumping, running, bending.

The other three are usually described as the soft ones. They are not soft, they are just harder to measure, which is a different thing. Psychological is how a player handles pressure and correction. Educational is how quickly they learn something and whether they still have it next week. Social is how they behave in a squad, recorded as behaviour, with dates and examples, never as a verdict on a child’s character.

Here is what each looks like on assessment day.

Technical

Day one, with a ball. First touch on the right foot and the left, receiving under pressure, a first touch that takes the ball somewhere useful. Close control and turns, timed dribbling in a straight line and through a course, control in a confined space. Then the thinking part: scanning before receiving, awareness, pattern recognition, and a short decision task under time pressure. It is recorded on video and scored against a rubric, so a score is never a general impression of how a player looked.

The Technical band descriptors run from blue, which is consistent and adaptable under pressure, down to red, which means major limitations in control, execution or awareness. A red here means the work goes on fundamentals first. It is a reading of one assessment on one day, and it comes with a plan.

Athletic

Also day one, and the most data-heavy part of the visit. Short sprints over five, ten and twenty metres from a recorded start position. Agility tested to the left and to the right, because a player who turns well one way and badly the other has an asymmetry worth knowing about. Counter-movement and squat jumps, with landing mechanics demonstrated first and every attempt recorded. Some running endurance work, scaled to age. Flexibility and mobility observed and graded.

Every repetition is written down, not just the best one. The surface, the footwear, the timing method and any false start are noted. Testing stops if a child reports pain or if landing quality deteriorates. And for the younger age groups the whole battery is shorter and weighted towards movement quality rather than output, because a six-year-old's ten-metre time is not the point of assessing a six-year-old.

Psychological

Day two. This is the pillar that carries the most weight in our football model, and the one parents are most wary of, so it is worth being precise about what it is. It is not a mental-health assessment. Nobody diagnoses anything, and no member of staff will.

What it does is observe how a player responds: to instruction, to correction, to a mistake, to a task getting harder. There is a short questionnaire, and for younger athletes a parent's input as well. There are guided decision scenarios and video-based football situations. And there is the session itself: how the athlete handles frustration, whether they can pause and reset, how they take feedback in the moment. The domains are motivation, attitude, emotional regulation, rational processing and cognitive processing, and each is recorded as behaviour observed, with context.

Educational

Also day two, and the pillar most football assessment leaves out entirely. The assessor teaches a new technical pattern the athlete has not seen before, gives them several repetitions, then changes the context and watches whether they can recall and apply the principle without being told again.

That is a direct measure of learning rate, retention and application, and it tends to be the thing that explains why two players with identical physical scores develop at completely different speeds. A player who learns something in three repetitions and still has it a fortnight later will make more of any programme than a player who needs it re-taught every week. For a parent it is one of the most useful things in the report, because it changes how a coach should work with the child, and it is something you can watch for yourself at training.

Social

Recorded across both days rather than tested on one. Manners, respect for staff and equipment and opponents, response to correction, communication, leadership, teamwork and conduct. All of it is written down as observable behaviour with dates, context and examples: what happened, when, and what the athlete did.

It is never a verdict on a child's character, and the standard says so in its own words. We do not write anything in a report that we would not say to that child's face, with their parent in the room.

Why the last three are scored like the first two

Because they are measured, evidenced and banded in the same way. Each has a rubric, each has recorded evidence, and each produces a band that feeds the overall score. The difference between the pillars is what they measure, not how seriously they are taken.

And because the last three are usually where the plan lives. A technical gap is easy to see and easy to drill. Why the gap is not closing after months of drilling is very often a question about learning, or pressure, or what is happening in the squad, and a report that has measured those three has somewhere to look. A report that has not is left guessing, and guessing is what the whole standard exists to replace.