Michael Barth and Arne Güllich are two outstanding academics in the youth sport area. Their work focuses on the environments and factors which lead to successful senior athletes in a variety of sports. Over a number of years they have shown that the sport system’s ability to predict senior sport performance from junior sport performance is extremely poor. Their latest paper shows a 0-4.6% correlation between junior and senior performance in Olympic Sports – a bleak return on investment for junior development programs in most sporting organisations.
Findings like these are informing the talent identification and development process at Maribyrnong Secondary College as we aim to offer a nation leading school-based talent development environment. We regularly review our processes both within the athletic development department and the overall academy. Recent internal research and professional development has reinforced the role of an environment with a long term athletic development philosophy in enhancing athlete availability, skill development and physical fitness. Hopefully, these messages and other changes in programming leads to greater athlete availability for our students aiming to develop their skills in their sports.
A part of the MSA ethos is the constant sharing of ideas and research and drive of the staff to be the most knowledgeable practioners they can be. This is why the MSA Research Centre was launched late last year – to develop a centre where academics, coaches, allied health professionals and educators can share and generate new knowledge which informs future talent development environments. In that spirit, is it time to critically think about junior sports academies. Maybe it’s more true that junior sports academies have an important educational and engagement role than a performance role. Advocating that high performance in these academies leads to high performance in seniors could be overzealous for a majority of people based on the current evidence. Factors outside of junior performance including opportunity to compete a senior elite level compared to junior level, selection biases and effect of injury on performance must contribute to a larger extent to senior performance. But these are all factors of the sporting system which have been consistent over time and must be considered when people advocate that a talent development system “produces exceptional athletes”. Right?
Moreover the correlations reported by Barth and colleagues are not facts which the general public will find easy to accept. It flies against convention that junior sports performance and senior sports performance have almost negligible correlation. If that is true, then what’s the role of a coach/practitioner in a junior environment – I’m sure there’s plenty of answers to that question but it’s one that must be considered thoughtfully since the answer “to increase performance” could actually be counter-intuitive to the long term outcomes of a talent development system. Especially if those are the answers of coaches of 10 to 14 year olds in a late-specialisation sport.
Another important consideration is that selection and performance are two different constructs. Whilst senior selection may occur based on junior performance due to maturation bias, relative age bias and subjective bias in general, senior performance is not guaranteed. A change in philosophy from “our academy produced x who was selected” to “our academy produced this high performing senior athlete” may be a more valid approach to appraise the success of talent development environments but also may not be very marketable due to the low occurrence of these cases, long-term (5+ years) payoff of this approach and likelihood of a null outcome (low to moderate senior performance) for the majority.
Where does this leave us? Barth and colleagues advise that measuring progress late (whenever that is for each sport) in the talent development progress may be an important predictor for senior sport performance. To get to the late stages of the talent development pathway, Paul Larkin has shown repeatedly that GRIT is an important psychological trait to possess. When athletes bring that trait and coaches create a junior development environment which challenges athletes and affords psychological safety during a difficult period in their lives, junior athletes thrive. Specialising/not specialising in a sport accelerates or decelerates the rate of skill acquisition and performance (see Michael Barth’s other work) and the timing of this could be an interesting policy strategy with long term benefits for senior sport performance within sporting organisations.
Clearly, talent development environments are here to stay. I am employed within one and enjoy the work that we do. The findings of Barth et al. reinforce that senior performance outcomes and junior performance outcomes are independent. An alternate hypothesis may be that there are thresholds of junior performance for senior performance outcomes i.e. it may not be the winner of the U16s national 10km race which makes the Olympics rather it could be one of the athletes who come 2nd to 6th who possess the grit to maintain their training. My interpretation of the findings of the paper by Barth and colleagues and the rest of the talent development literature is that investment in junior athletes with grit, developing athletes in an environment which times the specialisation of their training with peak periods of high performance of their sport (early/late specialisation sports) and ensuring adequate athletic development occurs in these training environments to reduce injury risk, increase athlete availability and improve performance are considerations which help athletes get closer to “where the money is (senior competition)”. Professional sport is the payoff for most athletes and affords them lives which allow them to continue to improve their performance with financial security. The purists may argue that sport training and high performance development is all about the sport and performance. But if you can’t feed yourself and have no shelter, you can’t perform well regardless of your training regime. Which is why parents form an important role in the athletic development of junior and senior athletes – but that’s a whole different blog altogether.
Those same purists may also fawn over the latest new talent in a sport of their choosing. Unfortunately evidence would say that if we’re talking about a high performing adolescent, the odds of sustained high performance into adulthood are not in their favour.
My return to the blogosphere is one afforded by convenience rather than strategy. I’m not sure that this is going to be regular but while you’re here feel free to look around at my other articles, archived for future me to look back at who I was in the past. What I do hope is that my “musings” make you curious about the research we do at MSA and VU. If that is the case, our doors are open for research collaborations, education sessions and site visits. Reach out to either myself (gyan.wijekulasuriya@vu.edu.au) or Paul Larkin (paul.larkin@vu.edu.au) for further enquiries. In the spirit of Carl Woods (see Sports Medicine Jan 2024 edition for his latest paper), we are wayfinding through the process of developing the research centre and welcome engagement. The saying in-house at MSA is “it’s not a no, it’s a how can we achieve this?”. So if you have an idea, come and join us as we try to conduct research to improve the health and, dare I say it, performance of our developing athletes.
Figuring out Sport 