The Importance Of Coaching In A Talent Development Environment

Coaching adolescents in a talent development environment, I have selected this group as I have always wanted to coach in a talent development environment as I feel coaching and finding the next great athlete in any given sport and turning their gift into recognised talent would give me a greater sense of achievement over any winners medal you could possibly get. The skills and qualities I will concentrate on within this group are; relative age effect as this is a serious flaw in the talent development system to date, I will also look at how within a talent development scheme it is not always about winning as this is not the most effective way of producing senior success. Another quality of coaching in a talent development I will look at is

However, there is limited evidence to suggests that development pathways are efficient at producing elite adult athletes (Vaeyens et al., 2009). The retention of athletes making it through from junior development pathways has ranged from 28.1%-55.6% (McCarthy & Collins, 2014), although this definition of retention can be misleading as junior squads are usually larger than the senior squads, meaning 100% retention is more often than not impossible. There are various factors which can affect athlete dropout and development pathway efficiency, these are injury, athletes moving out of the sport or the athlete being dropped from the development

One of the main things as a coach of this group you have to consider is how much more development has their body got to go through, for example when picking which athletes get into the talent development program you have to think about when they were born as someone who was born in the first quarter of the year are more likely to be physically mature than an athlete who was born in the fourth quarter, giving them distinct advantages meaning you may miss an athlete with a greater potential due to them being younger and not developing yet. Another thing a coach must do when coaching this group is not to centre everything around winning as they are there to develop the athletes into elite senior athletes and if they focus solely on winning they will not be putting the time and effort into developing other areas of the athlete, for example their mental state, as if they do not have the right frame of mind they can never truly reach their full potential as if they do not have good commitment they will end up probably dropping out of the sport all together and if they do not have persistence they will give up any time a competition or match gets too hard for them to cope with. You also need to