Search

Contains fulltext : 232208.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) This literature review provides an overview of the various modern approaches in talent programs for the context of schools and sports reported in scientific journals (2009-2019) and presents their similarities and differences and options for cross-pollination between contexts. This is a first attempt to overarch contexts regarding talent identification and development. Searches in 12 databases yielded 31 studies. Similarities and differences between contexts were distilled through a qualitative content analysis and described for the identification of talent and talent development. Based on these results, it is suggested that school contexts might benefit from including a talent transfer pathway, differentiating for maturity-level and sex, emphasizing on deliberate practice, monitoring load-ability, and applying acceleration, which are proposed approaches in the sport context. Furthermore, several approaches from the school context could enhance talent programs in sport, including universal screening, paying attention to underserved populations, focusing on creativity and enrichment as well as enhancing the accountability and education level of trainers/coaches. Future studies need to evaluate the efficacy and feasibility of approaches in practice. Moreover, the search could be expanded to other countries to establish a more global view while examining national patterns regarding policy and funding contexts in which programs are located. 34 p.

Though the existence of Relative Age Effects (RAEs) has been documented through a multitude of studies spanning various sports and levels of play, application of solutions related to RAEs has been ...

The past few decades have seen a significant change in the delivery of sport and in trends related to athlete development. However, the notion of talent continues to play a critical role in most athlete development models. In this brief review, we highlight concerns with the notion of talent and how it is conceptualized in high performance sport systems. These include: the assumption that talent is a fixed capacity that can be identified early, the influence of talent beliefs on athlete development, the different levels of risk for talent selection decisions, biases evident in approaches to athlete selection, the inadequacy of current statistical approaches, the problems with using current performance to predict future outcomes, and how short-term priorities and competition between sports for talented athletes undermine the overall efficiency of athlete development systems. These concerns form the basis for more focused discussion of avenues for future work in this field.

The community size effect (or birthplace effect) suggests that high-performance athletes are less likely to emerge from regions with population sizes that are very small or very large. However, previous research on elite Canadian ice hockey players has not considered the influence of intra-national regional variation of population distributions with respect to community size effects. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to test the heterogeneity of the community size effect between Canadian National Hockey League draftees (2000-2014: n = 1505), from 7 provincial regions within Canada (i.e., British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic Provinces). The proportion of athletes in the 9 census population categories were compared to the national and regional general population distributions in the census categories. Results suggest variability of community size effects between the 7 provincial regions within Canada, with only the province of Ontario demonstrating a community size effect congruent with effects reported in previous research. Using regional general population distributions as the comparator to athlete populations changed the direction, meaningfulness and magnitude of community size effects. In conclusion, elite ice hockey player community size effects may not be generalisable to all regions within Canada.

The relative age effect (RAE) has been demonstrated in many youth and professional sports. In this study, we hypothesized that there would also be a RAE among youth chess players who are typically involved in a complex cognitive task without significant physical requirements. While typical RAEs have been observed in adult chess players, in this paper we wanted to focus primarily on youth chess players. In addition, we also examined RAEs in both participation rates and performance levels in a national chess championship. Therefore, the RAE was examined in a complex cognitive task that has no significant physical requirements, more specifically among youth chess players. Data were analyzed (1) for all registered Belgian youth chess players over a 5-year period (2009–2013) and (2) for participants of the Belgian youth championship 2013. Results indicated an overall RAE among all Belgian youth chess players over the last 5 years. The likelihood of participation was significantly greater for players bo...

There is little research investigating the maintenance of perceptual-cognitive expertise in general and even less comparing coaches of different ages. The aim of this study was to test for perceptual-cognitive differences between age groups, licence levels, and their interaction. This study investigated differences in skilled performance between young and middle-aged coaches of three different skill levels. Participants performed an accuracy-oriented pattern recall (mean distance in pixel) and a time-oriented flicker test (mean detection time in ms). There were some significant differences between age groups and between skill groups for both tests, but no interactions. For the pattern recall test, the effect sizes were larger for skill level differences, while for the flicker test effects were larger for ageing. These results suggest coaches are able to maintain accuracy skills better than reaction timed tasks. This is in line with findings on speeded performance in general populations, which show declines with age. Moreover, results also support findings on perceptual expertise in skills where accuracy was important.

There is mounting research to suggest that cognitive and motor expertise is more resistant to age-related decline than more general capacities. The authors investigated the retention of skills in medium-aged skilled (n = 14) and older-aged skilled (n = 7) athletes by comparing them with medium-aged less skilled (n = 15) and older-aged less skilled (n = 15) participants. Participants performed basketball free throws and dart throws as a transfer task under standardized conditions. Motor performance (accuracy) and perceptual performance (quiet eye) were examined across the four groups. There were significant differences between skill groups and age groups in throwing accuracy on both throwing tasks. Skilled players outperformed less skilled and medium-aged players outperformed older-aged players in basketball and dart throws. There were no significant differences in quiet eye duration across the skill or age groups in either task. These results indicate expertise in a perceptual motor task such as the basketball free throw can be retained in older athletes and that present models of skill maintenance should be re-evaluated to consider the issue of transfer.

This study examined the impact of lateral preferences (i.e. left-dominant vs. right-dominant fighting stance) on success at different levels of judo competition (German University Championships vs....

Over the past decade a small evidence base has highlighted the potential importance of seemingly innocuous variables related to one's hands, such as hand dominance and the relative length of the second and fourth digits (2D:4D ratio), to success in sport. This study compared 2D:4D digit ratio and handedness among handball players selected to advance in a national talent development system with those not selected. Participants included 480 youth handball players (240 females and 240 males) being considered as part of the talent selection programme for the German Youth National team. Hand dominance and digit ratio were compared to age-matched control data using standard t-tests. There was a greater proportion of left-handers compared to the normal population in males but not in females. There was also a lower digit ratio in both females and males. However, there were no differences between those selected for the next stage of talent development and those not selected on either handedness or digit ratio. These results add support for general effects for both digit ratio and handedness in elite handball; however, these factors seem inadequate to explain talent selection decisions at this level.

In an effort to understand the process of skill acquisition and decline, researchers have largely neglected a critical aspect of this development – maximizing time at the highest levels of achievement. This study examined length of career for professional athletes in basketball, football, ice hockey, and baseball and considers whether career length differed by position and player performance (standardized career performance). Results revealed career length differences among positions in baseball and football but not basketball and ice hockey. In all sports, longer careers were associated with superior performance, reinforcing the notion that performance is a critical indicator of career length and suggesting positional demands influence career length. Results highlight the need for further work on this important stage of development.

In many sports, policy-makers and administrators employ annual cohorts to reduce differences between athletes during childhood and youth. Although well-intended, unintended relative age effects (RAEs) usually occur. RAEs refer to the specific selection, participation and attainment disadvantages associated with participants' birthdates relative to an arbitrary 'cutoff' date used to group participants within annual age groups. To date, we have little understanding of RAEs in individual sports. In this article, Study 1 considered the presence of RAEs in 1474 ski jumping, 7501 cross-country skiing, 15,565 alpine skiing, 4179 snowboarders and 713 Nordic combined athletes. Chi-square analyses revealed significant RAEs for most of these contexts across sexes. In Study 2, RAEs in the aesthetic sports of figure skating (n=502) and female gymnastics (n=612) were considered. There was no effect for the figure skaters and an atypical effect for the gymnasts. The significant effects across most ski sports coupled with the null effects in figure skating and atypical effect in gymnastics suggest that sport-specific contextual factors are important elements in understanding the mechanisms of RAEs, although further work is necessary to validate these findings.

Left-handed performers seem to enjoy an advantage in interactive sports. Researchers suggest this is predominantly due to the relative scarcity of left-handers compared with right-handers. Such negative frequency-dependent advantages are likely to appear in inefficient game-play behaviour against left-handed opponents such as reduced ability to correctly anticipate left-handers' action intentions. We used a pre-post retention design to test whether such negative frequency-dependent perceptual effects can be reversed via effective training. In a video-based test, 30 handball novices anticipated the shot outcome of temporally occluded handball penalties thrown by right- and left-handed players. Between the pre- and post-tests, participants underwent a perceptual training programme to improve prediction accuracy, followed by an unfilled retention test one week later. Participants were divided into two hand-specific training groups (i.e. only right- or left-handed shots were presented during training) and a mixed group (i.e. both right- and left-handed shots were presented). Our results support the negative frequency-dependent advantage hypothesis, as hand-specific perceptual training led to side-specific improvement of anticipation skills. Similarly, findings provide experimental evidence to support the contention that negatively frequency-dependent selection mechanisms contributed to the maintenance of the handedness polymorphism.

There is evidence to suggest that sports experts are able to extract more perceptual information from a single fixation than novices when exposed to meaningful tasks that are specific to their field of expertise. In particular, Reingold et al. (2001) showed that chess experts use a larger visual span including fewer fixations when compared to their less skilled counterparts. The aim of the present study was to examine whether also in a more complex environment, namely soccer, skilled players use a larger visual span and fewer fixations than less skilled players when attempting to recognise players' positions. To this end, we combined the gaze-contingent window technique with the change detection paradigm. Results seem to suggest that skilled soccer players do not use a larger visual span than less skilled players. However, skilled soccer players showed significantly fewer fixations of longer duration than their less skilled counterparts, supporting the notion that experts may extract more information from a single glance. © 2011 Psychology Press.

Relative Age Effects (RAEs), describing attainment inequalities as a result of interactions between biological age and age‐grouping procedures, have been demonstrated across many sports contexts. This study examined whether an additional individual characteristic (i.e., handedness) mediated RAEs in tennis. Relative age and handedness distributions of 1027 male professional tennis players ranked in the year‐end ATP Top 500 for 2000–2006 were analyzed. Relatively older players, born in the first two quartiles, were over‐represented for right‐handed players (86.56%), whereas no RAEs were found for left‐handers (13.44%). Findings seem to suggest that left‐handers in tennis gain advantages that circumvent the RAE problem.

Researchers are only beginning to understand how contextual variables such as date of birth and birthplace affect the development of elite athletes. This article considers the generality of birthplace and date-of-birth effects in varying sport contexts. The Study 1 examined how environmental factors associated with an athlete's date-of-birth and size of birthplace predict the likelihood of becoming an Olympic athlete in Canada, the United States of America, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Study 2 examined date-of-birth and birthplace effects among athletes playing in the first professional league in Germany. Study 2 also examined the validity of birthplace as a proxy for early developmental environment by comparing birthplace with the place of first sports club in four German sports leagues. Results from both studies showed no consistent findings for date of birth. Findings from Study 2 also suggested incongruence between birthplace and location of first sports club as proxies for early developm...

Relative age effects (RAEs) refer to the specific selection, participation and attainment (dis)advantages which occur as a result of physical and cognitive differences within annual age-grouped cohorts. The present study tracked the existence of RAEs in professional German soccer by examining RAEs in players, head coaches and referees who represented professional soccer clubs or officiated in the Bundesliga from 1963/64 to 2006/07. An additional objective was to consider the social-cultural mechanisms responsible for RAEs, so for a similar period, population and soccer participation information was also obtained. When players were categorised into half decade groups, chi-square analyses predominantly showed RAEs across the history of the Bundesliga, irrespective of dates used for annual age grouping in junior/youth soccer. RAEs were also apparent for head coaches but not for referees. Participation data indicated consistent and progressive growth from 1950 to 1990. RAEs influence the likelihood of attaining professional player and coaching status in German soccer. With many coaches being former players, inequalities associated with annual age-grouping appear to extend beyond a playing career. Officiating was not affected, with referees suggested to emerge from an alternative development pathway. Increased popularity of soccer may have propagated RAEs over time, through intensification of competition and selection mechanisms.

The authors examined the movement patterns of 5 left-handed handball players (ranging from beginner to national level) who threw a handball to different sections of a goal as if a goalkeeper were present. The authors used time-continuous, 3-dimensional kinematic data to assess interindividual movement patterns and considered participants' intraindividual differences relative to different targets. Cluster analysis yielded the highest assignment rates for level of expertise; a mean of 92% of trials was correctly assessed. The authors observed an interaction with expertise for the intraindividual movement patterns. Variability in the novice throwers was increased, whereas (a) advanced throwers experienced a period of stability, and (b) the expert thrower's variability was increased. The results indicate that random variability characterizes novice motor performance, whereas active functional variability may exemplify expert motor performance.

Many methods for the identification of key variables in movement patterns have the problem that direct transferability back to coaches or players is not easy; this is because the variables used are not presented in the language of most sport participants. Using a research strategy—from the coaches back to the coaches—proposed by Roth (1996), this study tries to identify discriminative variables by an expert rating. The statistical problem was to analyze the reliability between three coaches. A new, weighted Kappa coefficient for multiple observers is introduced as an extension of what Fleiss proposed in 1971, which takes into account the different types of disagreement. It is concluded that the high variability among different variables´ reliability can be considered as a measurement of the difficulty for the expert ratings. The results also indicate that simple movement features could be identified and transferred as instructions for goalkeepers back to the coaches.

In-plane Raman scattering, via cleaved or polished sample edges, has been applied to GaAs/AlAs superlattices for investigating the angular anisotropy predicted for optical phonons in polar heterostructures. For both extreme short-period and long-period superlattices, the angular dispersion can be described within a simple dielectric continuum model, whereas this model fails for intermediate layer thicknesses. For intermediate thicknesses, mode mixing and effects of bulk phonon dispersion produce frequency gaps in the angular dispersion. For non-polar Si/Ge superlattices, in-plane Raman scattering enables a comprehensive investigation of interface roughness. The experimental features for the mechanical interface mode and the Si-like confined modes are well explained by microscopic calculations assuming two intermixed alloy monolayers at each interface.