Technology to help talent development in sports

Yael Averbuch makes a valuable point in her recent essay in The New York Times:

You decide how good you will be. Pia Sundhage, former coach of the United States women’s national team, once said, “Do not let a coach decide how good you will be.”

Young athletes might be on the verge of having nearly all of the means and opportunity they will need to self-determine much of their athletic futures, at least for major sports.

As it currently stands the talent development process in youth sports depends on the competitive association infrastructure, like the AAU teams and tournaments for basketball, the Development Academies for soccer and the competitive 7-on-7 football programs and their ties to high school football. Progressing to become an elite athlete often depends on getting selected for a top regional or national team, then getting the critical repetitions against peers who have similar potential.

The self-determination factor could be improved, but the current system will always be limited by having only so many slots on elite developmental teams. And with the decline in sandlot and pickup games, interested young athletes who fall outside the elite teams struggle to find an environment to advance skills and gain playing experience.

Technology might have a solution to the problem of young athletes coordinating their own athletic progress. A promising collaboration between Jogamaisum, a Brazilian sports organization, and Google, has developed a platform for coordinating participation in group sports. Other interfaces have addressed the situation with sport- or location-specific interfaces but this platform, called joga+1, has a universality that makes it more likely to reach a large critical mass of participants.

The other technological boost to athlete development is maybe more subtle, and it is limited to sports that possess huge media footprints. Videogames, specifically EA Sports Madden football game, have helped large numbers of young people gain deep tactical understanding of sports. The intellectual gains have had on-field repercussions. In football, video games spawned 7-on-7 and the sport has become increasingly complex for players and teams at younger and younger levels. Quarterbacks will now reference Madden in the context of the on-field game and it setting the stage for more advanced football training technologies.

The vital question is how repeatable the videogame to on-field skill transition is. Soccer is probably the next proving ground, with EA Sports FIFA series growing in popularity (also this) and the U.S. national teams on the lookout for talent. The opportunity is for young athletes who are interested in soccer to develop the advanced tactical understanding in the simulated videogame setting, and then to experiment with and express that tactical understanding in peer-level competition. If something joga+1 increases levels of informal game participation, it sets up the potential for a virtuous cycle where the virtual and real-world competition and learning become ongoing and mutually reinforcing.

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