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The role of classification in talent identification and development in Para sports
Published in Nima Dehghansai, Ross A. Pinder, Joe Baker, Talent Development in Paralympic Sport: Researcher and practitioner perspectives, 2023
Daniel Fortin‐Guichard, Eline Blaauw, Ralf van der Rijst, Sean Tweedy, David Mann, Michael Woods
Classification may impact talent development in a manner that is similar to the relative age effect. Those Para athletes who within their class are less impaired than others may be identified as talented and/or likely to be selected into a talent pathway if others perceive that they will have a competitive advantage or are easier to support. Those athletes may then enjoy better access to training opportunities, including better coaching, equipment and financial support (e.g., for traveling to competition, salary for coaches). Those athletes can therefore focus on training and maximize their chance of fulfilling their athletic potential. On the other hand, deselected athletes inevitably miss out on those crucial opportunities and instead must find their own resources. Spending time searching for financial support and quality coaches rather than training may impact their learning process, or could more simply lead to drop-out from sports entirely. Accordingly, athletes disadvantaged by their classification status may be even further disadvantaged if they have reduced learning opportunities.
Genetic testing for talent identification and development
Published in Silvia Camporesi, Mike McNamee, Bioethics, Genetics and Sport, 2018
Silvia Camporesi, Mike McNamee
Five factors play a major role in the development of athletic ability. These will be to a certain extent obvious to the reader, and are adopted and adapted from Yan et al. (2016): Deliberate practice, operationally defined in the milestone study by Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer more than 25 years ago as ‘engaging in activities created specifically to improve performance in a domain’ (Ericsson et al. 1993).The role of the family in childhood: parents/guardians obviously play a key role in the nurturing of any talent in children, not merely athletic talent. We unpack some of the ethical issues related to child-rearing and education below, and we outline how there is an inherent tension between the ‘duties’ of parents to help foster and development children’s talents, and a possible breach of autonomy if parents end up fostering these talents in very aggressive ways.The role of coach and trainer: in many ways the role of the coach/trainer is as pivotal as that of the family. Although similar, the two roles are not identical. For example, parents will have to have initiated their child to a particular sport before a coach can work on developing those skills or talents that the child may have. Often, the coach will ‘take over’ from the family in nurturing the child’s talents. This will be in a best-case scenario, as there will also be those cases in which a child may be discouraged from pursuing a specific athletic career, for example because s/he has a slower development (see next point).Relative age effect: it has been shown that individuals who are relatively older than their peers in a given cohort/year will perform better (Musch and Grondin 2001). These can lead to false positives (or, also, to false negatives for those children who develop relatively later) in talent identification and development programmes.Birthplace effect: it goes without saying that it matters where we are born for the amount of opportunities that we may have (in sport, or any other context). The amount of opportunities available to children will vary tremendously depending on where they are born: without speaking about gross inequalities of access to training facilities and coaches between developing and developed countries, even in high-income countries there will be wide disparities between – say – the amount of training facilities available in the capital and in more provincial regions of the same country.
The relative age effect in male and female English age-grade rugby union: Exploring the gender-specific mechanisms that underpin participation
Published in Science and Medicine in Football, 2022
Adam L. Kelly, Daniel T. Jackson, Donald Barrell, Kate Burke, Kevin Till
Based on an interaction between social policy (e.g., cut-off dates applied by sport governing bodies to organise and group children into (bi)annual age cohorts), as well as the timing of one’s birth within a cohort, an individual can be chronologically older or younger relative to their peers (Musch and Grondin 2001). The relative age effect (RAE) refers to the participation inequalities in the immediate and long-term across youth sport (Barnsley et al. 1985). In team sports for instance, those born early in the selection year have been shown to be significantly overrepresented in Australian Rules football (Haycraft et al. 2018), basketball (Delorme and Raspaud 2009), field hockey (Wilson 1999), handball (Schorer et al. 2013), ice hockey (Turnnidge et al. 2014), netball (Joll and O’Donoghue 2007), rugby league (Till, Cobley, Wattie, O’Hara, Cooke, & Chapman, 2009), soccer (Romann et al. 2020), and volleyball (Okazaki et al. 2011). As such, the contact nature of these team sports may further magnify the physiological advantages of those athletes who are chronologically older (Baker et al. 2009; Cobley et al. 2009).
Talent map: how demographic rate, human development index and birthdate can be decisive for the identification and development of soccer players in Brazil
Published in Science and Medicine in Football, 2021
Israel Teoldo, Felippe Cardoso
In addition to birthplace and HDI and its inherent factors, birthdate has also been considered a determining aspect for the process of player identification and development (Helsen et al. 2000a; Burgess and Naughton 2010). Research carried out with soccer teams with players from different age groups and performance levels, reported a higher frequency of players born in the first months of the year, when compared to those born in the last months (Helsen et al., 2000b; Helsen et al. 2005; Sierra-Díaz et al. 2017). Studies also suggest that players born early in the year are favored in sports, in comparison to their peers born late in the year (Côté et al. 2006; Augste and Lames 2011; Silva et al. 2018). This advantage (that favors players born in the first months of the year) is known as the Relative Age Effect (RAE) and is mainly related to the player’s physical and anthropometric development (Helsen et al., 2000a; Helsen et al. 2005). In addition to the physical and anthropometric advantages, research has highlighted that the longer time of practice as a result of age difference is also a determining factor (Burgess and Naughton 2010). Then, a very strong trend emerges showing the interrelation between relative age effect and the restrictions generated by individual, environmental and task characteristics (Wattie et al. 2015). This trend reinforces the importance of studies aimed at integrated analyses between the RAE, and characteristics of the birthplace of high-level athletes.
Research in Another un-Examined (RAE) context. A chronology of 35 years of relative age effect research in soccer: is it time to move on?
Published in Science and Medicine in Football, 2021
Simon J. Roberts, Allistair P. McRobert, James Rudd, Kevin Enright, Matthew J. Reeves
The common practice of chronologically age grouping children and adolescents in sport is, generally speaking, designed to match children on their developmental milestones (i.e. experience, cognition, motor competence, social development and, to a lesser extent, physical development) (Malina et al. 2004). This approach can often result in differences in age of up to 12 months, which might not be considered much across the life course, but during early childhood can represent a substantial proportion of a child’s life (ibid.). For example, in England the cut-off date for participation in youth soccer begins on September 1st. Thus, players born in the later months of the selection year (i.e. June, July or August in England) are reportedly discriminated against via a biased view of current ability and future potential, when compared to players born earlier/closer to the cut-off point for selection. The reported asymmetric distribution of relatively older individuals’ success in sports in comparison to relatively younger participants is commonly referred to as the relative age effect (RAE; Wattie et al. 2008).