Decision-making skills of high-performance youth soccer players
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Dennis Murr1 1 2
· Paul Larkin2 · Oliver Höner1
Institute of Sports Science, Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Germany Institute for Health and Sport, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
Decision-making skills of highperformance youth soccer players Validating a video-based diagnostic instrument with a soccer-specific motor response
Introduction In team sports like soccer, a multidimensional spectrum of performance factors is required to perform at the elite level. This has been acknowledged by Williams and Reilly (2000) who developed a heuristic model for the categorization of soccer talent predictors. The model identifies potential talent predictors across four core areas of sport science, including physical, physiological, psychological and sociological characteristics. While there seems to be an emphasis on physiological and physical characteristics in research and practice (Johnston, Wattie, Schorer, & Baker, 2018; Wilson et al., 2016), recently, there has been increased interest in the psychological attributes, such as perceptual-cognitive factors (Mann, Dehghansai, & Baker, 2017). Researchers have highlighted the importance of perceptual-cognitive factors for skilled performance, with findings showing highly skilled players possess superior decision-making, anticipation and situational probability proficiency compared to their less-skilled counterparts (e.g., Lex, Essig, Knoblauch, & Schack, 2015; Ward, Ericsson, & Williams, 2013). The focus of the current study is decision-making as the cognitive performance factor. Causer and Ford (2014) define decision-making in sports as a cognitive process in which one uses
knowledge about a (current) situation to select an appropriate decision, based on one’s perceived ability to execute a context-specific motor skill. From a sporting perspective, the ability to make the correct decision during complex game situations, under high game pressure and time constraints is a key component of in-game performance (Höner, Larkin, Leber, & Feichtinger, 2020). Thus, decision-making has been shown to be an important skill, with several cross-sectional studies assessing decision-making performance and demonstrating that decision-making skills discriminate between skilled and less-skilled players in team sports (e.g., Diaz, Gonzalez, Garcia, & Mitchell, 2011; Lorains, Ball, & MacMahon, 2013; Woods, Raynor, Bruce, & McDonald, 2016). With respect to soccer, Ruiz Pérez et al. (2014) found Spanish club players with international experience demonstrated better decision-making performance in comparison to local level players. Further, Höner (2005) found youth national players had superior decision-making skills compared to local youth players, and additionally older players (i.e., U17 age group) had a significant decision-making performance advantage over younger players (i.e., U15 age group). While researchers have used an expertise approach to highlight superior performance of expert/elite players over novice/nonelite
players (e.g., Ruiz Pérez et al., 2014) research is scarce wi
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