How is talent defined, measured and supported in sport? That was the central question of the latest iteration of the Science Café, an ongoing series of free public panels hosted by the University of Toronto Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education.
Featuring KPE researchers and experts from the wider community, the Science Cafés tackle burning questions of the day in the world of sport and physical activity.
“It’s hard to find a word that is more baggage-laden and confusing than talent,” said Joe Baker, a professor at KPE and Tanenbaum chair in sport science, data modelling and sports analytics. “We use this word a lot, but it doesn’t mean the same to everyone, so the challenge becomes how do you measure it in a way that allows you to make recommendations?"
While technical skills can be measured, Baker explained, what’s beyond that is what makes the difference.
“Mental strength, for example, … we know this capacity is important for athletes at the end of the pathway, but more longitudinal data is needed to understand the multifaceted ways these skills interact,” he said. “As researchers, we try to get people to think of talent as an emergent property, a process to be nurtured and facilitated.”
Devin Pleuler, senior director of research & development at Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, said that talent identification processes are each unique and deeply complicated. The player characteristics that may be important for one sport may be different for another.
In some sports, like soccer, there are tens of thousands of athletes, making it impossible for scouts to watch every single one of them.
“Data helps early filtering and mitigates some of the more entrenched biases that exist in traditional scouting environments, but these processes are far from perfect,” said Pleuler. “How you filter the information is important.
“For example, if you set a threshold for speed, are you excluding players who don’t need to sprint because they’re always at the right place at the right time?”
In a sense, said Pleurer, you should be paying attention to those players who seem out of place and ask yourself why they are on the field nonetheless.
In amateur sport, like the Olympic and Paralympic Games, there are fewer resources to track and monitor athletes, said James Brough, director of performance pathways at the Canadian Sport Institute Ontario.
“In some ways, our process is the opposite to scouts in professional sports, because we start by looking at athletes who perform well at a competition and then test them to see if they’re meeting certain thresholds,” said Brough.
Lou Farah, hockey research & development analyst at the Toronto Maple Leafs, highlighted the importance of assessing athletes outside of their environments.
“You can assess players across two fronts - on ice (or court or field) to see how they contribute to the team, and off ice, which is trickier, but provides insight into how that impacts their play.”
That’s where the intelligence that the scouts gather comes into play, said Farah, adding that it’s crucial for coaches, scouts and data to work together to get the whole picture about an athlete.
Understanding the environment of the club is also handy in predicting how an athlete might fit in the club.
“The more explicit the criteria, the better the selection,” said Farah, noting that there is a lot of turn-over in professional sports, so it’s hard to predict what the culture might look like in six years from now.
Can athletes be active agents in their own development, panel moderator Katie Johnston, a senior research associate at KPE, wanted to know.
“Self-regulation guides this,” said Farah, “but it’s crucial that athletes and coaches are collaborating and that younger athletes are exposed to veterans who exhibit those traits.”
Luc Tremblay, a professor at KPE and director of the Centre for Motor Control, spoke about the importance of understanding how athletes use auditory cues to identify other athletes.
“Sound bounces on people and objects and tells your brains where things are,” said Tremblay. “Knowing where your teammates are without looking at them is trainable and shows great potential.”
Tremblay also mentioned the capacity of athletes to visualize and imagine things as another mental practice that is teachable.
Johnston posed the question of what gender differences exist in the talent identification and development environment, leading Brough to highlight the gap that seems to exist in the understanding of the differences in developing male and female athletes.
“Women are being coached like men without consideration for factors that differentiate them,” he said, adding that accessibility is another big reason sport is missing out on great athletes.
“The cost of participation, location, infrastructure all contribute to a lack of accessibility for athletes – and coaches,” said Brough. “Something needs to be done on a fundamental level to change that.”
The role of parents in optimizing talent depends on the child’s needs, their age and sport of choice, said Baker.
“One thing that’s not up for negotiation is that parents should be an unwavering source of support and love and not put pressure on their children,” he said.
One other thing not up for negotiation? The benefits of researchers and professionals in the field collaborating – starting with public discussions of the kind facilitated by the KPE Science Café.
Listen to the full discussion in the video above.