Talent Identification and Development Programmes in Sport
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LEADING ARTICLE
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Talent Identification and Development Programmes in Sport Current Models and Future Directions Roel Vaeyens,1 Matthieu Lenoir,1 A. Mark Williams2 and Renaat M. Philippaerts1 1 2
Department of Movement and Sports Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium Research Institute for Sport and Exercise Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK
Abstract
Many children strive to attain excellence in sport. However, although talent identification and development programmes have gained popularity in recent decades, there remains a lack of consensus in relation to how talent should be defined or identified and there is no uniformly accepted theoretical framework to guide current practice. The success rates of talent identification and development programmes have rarely been assessed and the validity of the models applied remains highly debated. This article provides an overview of current knowledge in this area with special focus on problems associated with the identification of gifted adolescents. There is a growing agreement that traditional cross-sectional talent identification models are likely to exclude many, especially late maturing, ‘promising’ children from development programmes due to the dynamic and multidimensional nature of sport talent. A conceptual framework that acknowledges both genetic and environmental influences and considers the dynamic and multidimensional nature of sport talent is presented. The relevance of this model is highlighted and recommendations for future work provided. It is advocated that talent identification and development programmes should be dynamic and interconnected taking into consideration maturity status and the potential to develop rather than to exclude children at an early age. Finally, more representative realworld tasks should be developed and employed in a multidimensional design to increase the efficacy of talent identification and development programmes.
Talent identification (‘TID’, i.e. the process of recognizing current participants with the potential to excel in a particular sport) and talent development (‘TDE’, i.e. providing the most appropriate learning environment to realize this potential) play a crucial role in the pursuit of excellence (figure 1).[1,2] In many organizations and top level teams, sciencebased support systems (e.g. psychological counselling, physical conditioning, computer-based match
analysis) are now fundamental to the preparation of elite athletes. However, due to the lack of scientific grounding for most TID programmes, many scholars have suggested that research efforts should be transferred from TID and detection to TDE and guidance.[3,4] Yet, despite the change in research focus,[4,5] many national federations and club teams, particularly in the professional sports, continue to invest considerable resources in an effort to identify
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