11+ sports scholarship assessment

[Wondergirls]

Dear parents,

My DD has an 11+ sports assessment next week where they will assess her fitness and football and netball skills. Please could anyone shed light on what is expected of them to do? Apparently they test their fitness level, speed, agility and endurance. How exactly do they do all this? What will she be asked to do? She’s nervous and we just want to get an idea so that there’s nothing unexpected that may throw her or put her off. She’s fit and a good football player but she’s thin and not muscular or strong so we’re a bit worried.

Please can someone specify what the fitness assessment involves exactly?

Thank you very much.
Wondergirls

They will almost certainly do a beep test. How they assess the individual sports varies from school to school.

Tell her not to worry if there are parts she is less familiar with. They tend to test a very wide variety of skills and no-one will do well in all. Some kids are slightly less agile / fast / fit but very strong, the assessment combines sports specific assessments with all-round skills. There is no one answer for you as each school does it differently. Apart from her particular sports, they will probably check general ball skills (throwing / catching), sprinting (could include bleep test), strength (rowing machine), basic gymnasics (forward roll / backward roll). It really depends, I have heard of all of these.

Basically they will check the specific sports your daughter is strong in plus general athletic ability as they want to see if someone might be a potential rower / cricketer / athlete in the future.

So even if strength is tested, this might just be a chance for someone who will be great at shotput to shine, it doesn't mean it's a problem if your daughter is not strong (yet).

To my knowledge, many of the schools give some information on what is expected in advance. If she is sporty in general, there is nothing to worry, and most children enjoy the day no matter their level.

DD has done two sports scholarship assessments and DS (Y9) also did the 11+ rounds. The fitness tests they've done have been:

Beep test
Strength test - this is pulling up a bar, attached to a PC, which calculates their strength output
Speed - so running between lasers to measure acceleration
Vertical jump - measuring how high they can jump from a standing start
Standing long jump

They are also likely to measure total height, sitting height and weigh them. Obviously it varies from school to school but these seem to be fairly standard.

DD sat two last year, neither involved weighing or measuring - one was a beep test, hockey and a cross country run and i think the other was similar.