We must not make pawns of budding talent

At six-foot-two and well over 80Kgs, with a birthday in January and older siblings who play football as well, Kerry minor footballer David Clifford is your typical easy spot for future success, writes Dr Ed Coughlan

As coaches we can often get lost in the inane conversation of talent identification. We are too quick to proudly announce that a current adult talent was spotted for greatness as a kid.

More often than not, it is much ado about nothing, as those same people are the quickest not to mention the dozens of other future picks of theirs that never materialised into a successful career athlete.

Retrospective talent identification is the discourse where everyone is always right. As the saying goes: Hindsight is the foresight of a gobshite.

There may be no sport that escapes the dreaded and fruitless search for talent. It is the greatest lottery on the planet where mass investment is gambled on a hunch.

The American sports of football in the NFL and basketball in the NBA are probably the most obvious stages where talent identification is a billion dollar industry; with primetime TV coverage on draft days to announce to the world the selection of the chosen few. Where number-crunching stats and subjective opinion can sway an athlete’s stock to either rise or fall in the blink of an eye. Yet more often than not, their expected athletic dominance does not come to pass.

It must be incredibly challenging for conscientious coaches in those sports to stay true to a holistic coaching ethos to ensure their young athletes develop all the skills necessary to fulfil their athletic dreams. With so much money at stake and no room to hide when things go wrong, there is so much more to good youth coaching than meets the eye.

How do you intentionally slow down a youth athlete’s progress so they can work on a weakness? That one step back may enable the critical two steps forward later on in their development. How do you convince that same athlete’s parents of the importance of their kid playing in more than one position as a teenager, even if it may forsake results of the team as a whole? Such a process-oriented ethos will embed a greater understanding of the trials and tribulations of winning and losing. Not to mention the opportunity to learn game intelligence and spatial awareness; two things we are told are natural gifts — what nonsense.

All too quickly the mistitled gifted kids or talented teams get special treatment with coaches choosing to enhance their strengths and protect them from the discomfort of their weaknesses at this formative stage of their development.

Right now we are exposed to the expected future talents within the GAA across all codes with minor hurling and football and U21 hurling All-Ireland finals getting maximum exposure over the next fortnight.

Of course the majority of these young pretenders will not progress to play representative ball at the highest level. There simply are not enough spaces at the top of the pyramid. However, I fear that the evolutionary processes of natural selection are all too often provided as answers for why this is the case.

For me, the coaching and general environment surrounding the development of youth athletes are far more influential factors on athlete progression. I appreciate the landscape is changing, for the better, but not fast enough to save the current generation and maybe several more to come.

Evidence from the relative age effect research has informed us of the perils of coaches getting swayed by the talents of kids, who more often than not, are just older than their peers as a result of a fortunate birth date or may have older siblings creating competition in everything they do from day one.

I, like a lot of others, am appalled at the suggestion of streaming kids based on their ability. Unlike a lot of others my disgust is still strong when the same suggestion is made for the adolescent player. It is still too early to make such decisions. Of course, structures are put forward as an argument because administrators request clubs to submit their A, B, C, and D squads by a certain date. So what? Let’s randomly assign our teenagers to these teams making sure to have an even amount of kids from each annual quartile in each squad. Now the qualities of your coaching will be needed and tested. Maybe even exposed. There’s nothing wrong with that either.

But still, I am not convinced that excuses the rate of drop off of players who fail in their attempt to transition from elite level youth athlete to elite level adult athlete.

Coaching scientists inform us of the structural differences during these in-between years. Where volunteerism is more apparent at the younger stages of sport and the results-based business of adult sport is a major deterrent to keeping such good people involved for longer.

But again, I fear this reason steers us further away from the problem that causes the raft of exits by adults from our beloved sports.

How do so many athletes progress to senior standard with so many gaping holes in their athletic armour? Too many youth athletes enter their 20s still unable to run efficiently, not to mention an inability to stop fast, turn quickly and take-off and land proficiently. It is worth mentioning that these movement skills are the predictable ones that we tend to coach in a gym with plyometric exercises. How many coaches spend time with their youth athletes creating opportunities for them to explore the unpredictable movements of falling, colliding and coping with failed pre-planned manoeuvres of play?

From a motor skills perspective, the imbalances are even more apparent. Players hitting their 20s, with sometimes as much as 15 years of experience in the sport, are still unable to pass off both sides with anything close to parity between their limbs. Now the senior coach is having to attend to elements of athletic development that should have been boxed off many years earlier.

Finally, there is the cognitive skills required at a youth level which are significantly different to those required at a senior level.

Youth sports are not just a mini version of adult sports. In fact, youth sports are where talent can often be magnified, even exaggerated. An early developer can appear to be streets ahead of their peers, but of course such an advantage soon disappears when age-grades disappear.

In that regard, Kerry’s minor football captain David Clifford springs to mind. But at six-foot-two and well over 80Kgs, with a birthday in January and older siblings who play football as well, he is your typical easy spot for future success. That should not be a crutch to this young man’s development. It is fair to say that much of his talents to date have little or nothing to do with coaching. That will not be the case if he is to make it as a senior player.

The disgraceful politicising of this teenager’s talent in Kerry has already begun to coerce him and his significant others to make the right decision about his athletic future for Kerry football. The mere mention of paying him to stay in Ireland to play an amateur sport so as not to venture Down Under to try his hand as a professional athlete in Australian Rules football is the very essence of interfering negligence.

The sooner we realise that our youth athletes are not pawns to be used to advance our coaching credentials the sooner youth athletes will be better prepared for the rigours of progression from youth to adult sport.