Talent Developing, changing our language & more
Here's some Skill Acquisition content for you to explore over the weekend. I hope you enjoy it!
This week at a sconce:
Research Insight: Representative Design and Talent Development
Podcast Snip: Youth Sport is not high performance
Quote: Talent and Coaching Developing
Tweet/Resource: The rise of Erling Haaland
Research Insight
The Role of Representative Design in Talent Development: A Comment on “Talent Identification and Promotion Programmes of Olympic Athletes”
This was a fantastic paper that I was reminded of during the week and went through again. The paper focuses on two specific questions
1)Why is there so much talent wastage?
2)And why do so few talent transfer programmes actually work?
The authors argue that part of the problem lies in how we identify and evaluate talent—often using isolated, de-contextualised tests. They then show us how we could incorporate ideas from Representative Learning Design to enhance Talent Development.
Here are my 5 key inisghts
1)Many talent tests lack realism. Talent ID protocols often strip away the complexity of sport, focusing on isolated physical or technical traits. From a CLA perspective we view real performance as messy and dynamic—context is king. If tests don’t reflect how players interact with their environment, we risk misjudging their potential.
Quote
"There is a heavy reliance on the use of standardised, de-contextualised tests of physical attributes or technical skills which may not reflect the dynamic context of performance."
2)From a CLA perspective, performers regulate their actions through the information available in the environment—like opponents, space, teammates etc. If assessments remove these features and break performance into isolated parts, they fail to reflect how skill actually works. Tests must be designed with representative design so they preserve the perception-action couplings that underpin real expertise
Quote
"Here, we propose that the assessment of representative design in talent development programmes in sport should be based on principles of Ecological Dynamics (see Pinder et al., 2011b) to allow talent sport scientists to capture the information in the environment that performers use to regulate their actions, rather than basing tests on discrete sub-phase performance measures being correlated with performance outcomes."
3)Expertise is about adaptability—not just executing a skill, but adjusting it to fit the demands of the moment. No two moments are ever going to be the same and skilled performers must constantly align their own movement tendencies (intrinsic dynamics) with the changing demands of the task.
Quote
"Expertise in sport is predicated on the ability of an athlete to adapt these intrinsic system dynamics to cooperate with those of a particular task; the transfer of expertise is therefore defined by the amount of cooperation or competition between the two."
4)We need to shift from early talent ID to long-term talent development. Rather than relying on one-off, isolated tests, a more effective approach is to support athletes over time in realistic, representative environments.
Quote
"This principled approach would entail a move away from snapshot TID methods towards structured talent development (TD) programmes… based on empirical evidence and representative learning and testing environments."
5)The authors of the paper provide some key principles that they recommend for the design of better evaluation tasks and just tasks for talent development in general. They are some nice principles to keep in mind
Embrace variability to reflect the unpredictable nature of sport
Include functional information from the real performance environment
Make decisions context-dependent, not scripted
Offer representative affordances, so players can act on what they perceive
Adapt to individual differences, recognising that no two athletes are the same
These principles help create learning environments that mirror the demands of sport, supporting real talent development.
Quote
"In reconsidering approaches to talent development, tasks should embrace variability, sample functional information sources from the performance environment, ensure decisions are context dependent, provide representative affordances for action, and consider individual differences."
Reference
Pinder, R. A., Renshaw, I., & Davids, K. (2013). The role of representative design in talent development: a comment on “Talent identification and promotion programmes of Olympic athletes”. Journal of sports sciences, 31(8), 803-806.
Podcast Snip
Youth Sport isn’t High Performance
I thought this podcast snip really suited this weeks newsletter. The language we use in Youth Sport is going to be really influential. Too often, the label ‘High Performance’ gets wrongly applied to underage sport, creating pressure for early specialisation and short-term results. But if we truly value long-term talent development, we need clearer language that distinguishes between developmental stages and senior elite levels. This helps coaches design environments that are appropriate for the athlete’s stage, not just a copy of high-level sport.
Quote
Coach and Talent Developing
“How would that look if you referred to it as a verb like coach developing or talent developing—these things that were ongoing… because the very notion of coach development or talent development denotes a defined start and then some end that you'd go 'okay now you're a coach that's been developed' or 'you're an athlete that's been developed'.”-Carl Woods
Carl is one of my favourite people to listen to talk about coaching. This brilliant quote definitely got me thinking during the week and I thought it complemented the Research paper above really well. When we treat “development” as a noun, it implies something that starts and finishes. But thinking of it as a verb—developing—highlights that coaching and talent development are continuous, evolving processes. If we take this approach to talent ‘developing’ then we’d avoid many pitfalls we often see.
This is from this fantastic episode of the Constraints Collective Podcast
https://open.spotify.com/episode/32H3qoPWcLPO1m11gzedAj?si=ryefc_iPQ_Cwji0Nv6_Opw
Tweet/Resource
Cheating a bit and killing two birds with one stone. This is a graphic that I included in a thread I did about the development of Erling Haaland. His Youth Team give a brilliant example of a Talent Devloping club.
Here’s a link to the thread if you’d like to check it out