dbandre - 10 June 2008 12:39 PM
Define talent???
With some certainty I can evaluate an athlete for a couple of months and figure out their hep and decat scores if they wanted to compete in the summertime and I can pretty much predict were an athlete will stand in their jump marks or the times they will run depending on they meet certain criteria in training/testing during the season. However, I don’t know of any coaches (including myself) who are close to being 50% accurate on telling a developing athlete how good they will be in the next season, let alone 2 or more seasons down the line. The eastern bloc countries tried this for nearly 40 years and only succeeded when they doped at the team level. What information the eastern bloc countries never made public was their attrition rates at their institutes of physical education, which were quite high and the influx of newer children as they become older, bigger, stronger, and faster to replace those who washed out. but at the youngest ages weren’t able to gain entrance to these prestigious institutes.
For an elite athlete I think we can make more accurate assumptions about performance in following 2-3 years, but beyond that nothing is certain.
Vern’s absolutely correct on this.
I respect the opinions of the previous posters, and would certainly yield on most issues to Mr. Gambetta, however I would like to give you a perspective from a parent who has paid for such training. Where we live, a fairly affluent suburb of Dallas, it common practice for kids to receive training in at least one sport from a professional trainer. I could give you dozens of specifc examples of several kids I know personally where such training has made the difference, but let me instead take you through a sequence of events that is very typical. First, a kid shows an interest in a sport as a 5th or 6th grader. Because the high school and even middle school teams are so competitive, (i.e., 100 boys trying out for the 8th grade basketball team) the parents decide to get their child involved with a select (as opposed to recreational) summer team. The child doesn’t have the skills to make the select team, but through one-on-one training, or small group training, the kid is able to advance enough to make the select team the very next season. Even if at that time the one-on-one coaching is discontinued, the kid sometimes becomes a star player on the local select team, but after a year or two at that level, still can’t quite catch on with one of the larger, year round, metro select teams. Since it seems that all of the high school players in almost every sport play on very high level metro select teams nearly year round, it seems necessary to progress the kid on to one of these better teams where they can experience higher level coaching and competition. So once again the kid utilizes one-on-one coaching, sometimes with two or more coaches throughout the week who focus on different aspects of the specific sport, and the kid is able to progress to better and better select teams until he is on one of the top metro select teams. He then makes the high school team, continues playing on the select team, and receives a full ride to a D1 or D2 university, or competes successfully at a highly prestitgious D3 school. The kid isn’t the biggest or the fastest, but he is generally in much better sports specific shape and has much better than average sport specific skills. This is not a ficticious story, but one that I have seen repeated dozens of times in my small community. My daughter graduated in 2002, my second daughter graduated this week, and my youngest son will be a freshman in high school, and in almost every sport, the kids getting the focused, professional training, whether its baseball, basketball, volleyball, track and field, hockey, or soccer, are the ones that are most successful. Football seems to be an exception, but even most of those kids go to Velocity, which is a fast twitch type of training. I’m not saying such training in any way guarantees such success, but in our community, those that do succeed past high school have benefited greatly from such training. While I know our community shares this phenomenom with other area suburban communities, it may not translate to more rural or urban communities, but even so I thought I would share my observations over the past 12-15 years with the forum.
To give you an idea of how popular this type of training is in my area, I list below just a few of the facilities that are literally within 5-15 minutes of my home. I, and many of fellow parents, use all of these facilities on a regular basis. And these are just the very large, very local facilities.
http://www.integratedathleticdevelopment.com/
http://dallasbat.com/index.htm
http://www.drpepperstarcenter.com/
http://www.velocitysp.com/coppell
