Predicting sports suitability
Australian Sports Commission
What we can and can't measure
The key to undertaking successful talent identification is trying to determine how much of the performance you can measure. While not an exhaustive list, the pie-chart below lists a number of general areas that can contribute to sporting performance. Those sports that can account for a greater area of the entire pie (or performance) have stronger predictive powers.
For example, it is easy to measure the physical and physiological attributes, but much harder to evaluate psychological and skill/decision-making abilities. Therefore, prediction in sports that have large physical and physiological pieces of pie (rowing and athletics) can be relatively high.
Conversely, sports like archery and table-tennis do not rely as much on the physical and physiological pieces of pie, but more on the difficult to measure skill/decision-making attributes. In these sports, where we can only account for a small proportion of the total pie, sporting predictions are more tenuous.
In short, the more of the performance we can measure, the better our ability to predict future potential. When the requirements for success are easily identifiable and there are distinct physical and physiological characteristics, predictive capacities are enhanced. For those more complex sports where attributes of success are difficult to objectively measure, alternative models (such as talent selection) need to be adopted.
Psychological strength: hard eggs versus soft eggs
An undisputed aspect of succeeding in sports relates to psychological attributes (the red piece of the pie in the above diagram). As yet there are no one-off pen and paper psychological tests that can definitively predict a potential champion. This is partly because the psychological profiles of elite athletes are extremely variable. However there are certain qualities that a coach might be looking for to help make a subjective decision about the likelihood of an athlete succeeding.
Looking at one dozen eggs (athletes) that look the same, it is difficult to know, by observation alone, which the soft eggs are and which the hard-boiled eggs are. Often a coach is looking for an egg that will stand up to the pressures of training and competition and will not easily ‘crack’ under pressure and break down at the slightest knock. The coach wants a hard egg, not a soft egg. Quite simply, an athlete might have the most phenomenal physical potential, yet it could remain unfulfilled because they mostly lack persistence and a ‘can do’ attitude. These are the characteristics of hard eggs that coaches are looking for.
If an athlete ‘throws in the towel’ often and easily, it is unlikely that they will become a successful athlete. Persisting with unfamiliar, sometimes difficult tasks is needed to acquire full sports mastery. Measuring persistence is usually done subjectively, and involves looking for the natural fight or spirit that a young athlete might possess. Here are some ways that coaches have sorted out the hard eggs from the soft ones!
It is rumoured that a well-known coach of budding young tennis stars weeded out a large proportion of hopefuls in the following way. He asked them to hit the tennis ball into the ground to make it go as high as possible. The catch was that the tennis stars couldn’t use their own equipment. Instead, he gave them an old racquet, an old tennis ball with a hole in it, and he left them on their own for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, the coach closely observed them from a secluded position. Quite simply, those who gave up hitting the ball during that time were asked not to come back!
In a similar strategy, a successful Romanian rowing coach would watch potential rowing prospects during a ‘dog and bone’ wrestle. A thick baton or stick (bone) was gripped tightly by two combatants. Like a dog wrestling with a bone, combatants tried to force one another outside of a circle to win the game and therefore the bone. Often the rowers were purposefully mismatched for size to observe their level of persistence in an unwinnable situation. The rowing coach was not interested in who won, but in how the athletes persisted in their struggles.
Another common test in talent identification involves cycling or running for approximately 10 to 15 minutes at a steadily increasing level of effort (e.g. multistage shuttle run). These tests culminate in voluntary exhaustion and can cause a considerable degree of temporary discomfort for the athlete. Quite often, coaches are uninterested during the build-up phase of such a test; however take a keen interest when the test becomes more difficult. Coaches who observe such testing sessions are assessing the ‘mongrel factor’—which athletes show a doggedness to continue when the test becomes hard? Despite scoring highly in these tests, many athletes have been overlooked for selection, based on the subjective impression that they gave only a 95 per cent effort, and not the full 100 per cent. For some coaches, an athlete’s ability to extract the final 5 per cent is vital.
