Talent
 
 
Introduction
The ultimate expression of athletic talent is high-performance competition. How do we recognize such talent, and how is it developed?
Talent: In English Dictionaries (e.g., Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999) it is:
tal·ent (n):
  1.     1) a natural ability to do something well;
  2.     2) a person or people with an exceptional ability
 
What Parents need to Recognize
In the modern world neither schools nor health systems are involved in talent identification, largely because athletic development is not linked to health needs. By default, the future of children’s athletic talent lies in the hands of parents.
Most parents have no real understanding what athletic talent represents. The North American culture of sport-as-entertainment, cars, desk jobs, and quick fixes does not embody either the knowledge or the patience for its recognition and its proper development. For most parents, talent is simply equated to performance – race results, and that means winning. To continue winning, you simply need to go harder. Unfortunately, when children win it means nothing about their athletic future, and to go harder simply leads to burnout.
Many capacities – physical and emotional, can be maximized only by building during growth. Hence, the ultimate expression of any talent is based on what is done through planned, systematic approaches to training over a 10 to 15 year period, beginning about age 10. When talent is judged in children, it is crucial to distinguish their chronological age from their phase of biological development.
Few children – very few indeed, have the capacity to achieve at high-performance competition. It lies within all, however, to break from the modern world to develop their maximum athletic potential as the highest possible expression of health. Whatever the athletic hopes of parents, the entire effort on developing talent in children must be placed with developing health. The focus on performance starts later, much later, after the capacity for work has been maximized at about ages 20 -  22. For cross country skiing, the capacity to perform peaks after age 25.
 
General Truths
To examine talent and how to grow it we need to recognize some general truths:
  1.     No talent is any good to anyone unless it is developed and used.
  2.     Although natural physical talents may be shown in children, their early expressions mean very little, almost nothing, about their ultimate expression.
  3.     Whatever capacities are inherited, their potential can only be realized through planned, progressive work.
  4.     The key to working in sport for life is to have fun and avoid burnout.
 
Talent Recognition
Talent identification should be part of any athletic program, but it should not be based simply on athletic performance – an event result. In addition to the obvious factor of heredity, others include physiology, psychology, heredity, sociology, and anthropometry. Such factors are not of equal importance, and their actual weighting depends on the athletic activity.
We know that children inherit physiological and psychological characteristics. Some inherited characteristics - height, limb length, speed and co-ordination are not influenced by environment, whereas others - weight, endurance and strength, can be altered through education and training. As such, in addition to heredity, family lifestyle is an important part of talent identification. Inherited physiological characteristics that compromise athletic performance also compromise the likelihood of an athlete reaching elite levels of sporting performance. Likewise, acquired habits also define limitations.
 
Talent Development
Talent development has three main phases.
The Health phase - Ages 6 to 10. This phase is aimed at recognizing and mitigating physical deficiencies that may restrict future athletic life – it is dominated by the medical profession. It includes examination of bone structures, musculature, and growth patterns.
General fitness phase– For XC skiing - Ages 10-15 (Girls) and 12-17 (Boys).
For athletes who have already experienced organized training. It includes a comprehensive assessment of physiological and anthropometric parameters, and psychological assessment and profiling.
Specific fitness phase - Implementation of Sport specific talent identification, including pain tolerance. Attention is focused on the athletes’ health, physiological adaptation to training, and potential for further improvements. Important criteria for this combined and complicated phase of monitoring are:
Athletes must have reached a physiologically stable biological age (generally 16 for girls and 18 for boys).
 
 
Talent Testing
Many different testing routines are done by athletes who train year-round, May to April, as part of systematic training programs: including the recording of Resting Heart Rates (RHR), and weight and height, as well as periodic, standardized physical challenges. For prepared athletes physical testing, including specialized testing, is not stressful and provides useful measures for coaching.
Athletes who are newcomers or otherwise sporadic participants in regular monitoring are far behind those who participate in long term development and have been gradually introduced to stress. The newcomers lack:
Self-discipline to monitor their own improvements;
Data marking change over time, with no basis to chart an improvement curve and to link changes in training to change in training phases to eventual race results;
Sport specific testing has value only after a minimum of 5 years of sport-specific training in cross-country skiing. The time horizon (>5 years) and the patience needed to follow training plans, which are otherwise seen as a lottery - it provides hope for short-term change (maybe it will work – go somewhere else if there are no immediate changes).
 Where athletes are developed systematically in general fitness, changes tracked through routine testing provide allow coaches to change the balance and emphasis of training routines to match biological age and state of preparation.  Such matches are critical to ensuring athletic development without burnout.
 
 
 
 
 
Athletic Talent can be grown
Too often it is simply wasted.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Chapter 5: Athletic Talent