Craig Pickering

Sports Science Quarterly – Q3 2024

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Every quarter we take a deep dive into the latest research in sports science. In this edition we look at the latest research on talent development environments, deliberate practice, reducing hamstring injuries, developing hardy coaches, and much more.

As always, the full Sports Science Quarterly is available exclusively to HMMR Plus Members. You can browse the past topics on our archive page. The first topic below is free to everyone, but sign up now to read about all the latest research. To get an idea of what Sports Science Quarterly is all about, the April 2016 edition is available in its entirety for free.

This Quarter’s Topics

Talent development environments

Quick Summary – Talent Development Environments are where athletes can best develop, but they require coordination between key stakeholders. This research paper examines what parents, athletes, and coaches think of various TDEs, and provides some key insights for coaches in being able to optimize them.

When working with athletes, it’s often tempting to look at how we can best develop them physically. This is especially true in athletics, where there is a clear correlation between physical attributes and performance, and, in turn, improving those physical attributes often improves performance. However, in recent years, there has been an increased amount of research on the environment in which athletes are developed, with such environments thought to have a large impact on aspects such as athlete motivation, which in turn can drive performance improvements. Back in 2005, researcher Russell Martindale coined the term Talent Development Environment (TDE) to describe these environments, finding that they had five key features:

  • Long-term aims and methods
  • Wide ranging coherent messages and support
  • An emphasis on appropriate development and not early success
  • Individual and ongoing development
  • An integrated, holistic, and systematic approach.

Building on this early research, Danish academic Kristoffer Henriksen created his model, Athletic Talent Development Environment, when exploring youth sports clubs. Henriksen’s model highlighted the importance of various social and relational features in the creation of an effective TDE.

The quality of a TDE can be measured via the Talent Development Environment Questionnaire (TDEQ), which has been validated across numerous settings. Research has demonstrated that athletes believe long-term developmental processes are a key strength of TDEs, with environments where coaches focus on goal setting and overall progress tending to score favorably. In contrast, athletes often report lower scores for questionnaire aspects relating to holistic development, which is typically characterized by a low level of coach concern for overall wellbeing, life outside of sport, and training and competition balance. Generally, the higher athletes rate their TDE, the greater the psycho-social and wellbeing outcomes.

Research into TDEs also highlights the key roles that various stakeholders play. Coaches are the obvious one here – they are responsible for creating and shaping the performance environment, as well as fostering positive athlete relationships and managing long-term athlete development. Parents also play a role, both positively and negatively. From a positive perspective, parents can provide athletes with overall support, such as emotional, financial, and administrative (e.g., driving young athletes to and from training). From a negative perspective, athletes can experience (real or perceived) pressure from parents, and, if they provide too much support, can prevent the athlete from developing responsibility and ownership in the processes. Crucially, parents, coaches, and athletes must work together when creating the overall TDE, something which Henriksen and his coauthors refer to as integration of efforts, which allows for congruent messaging and coordination of development. This coordination of effort can be enhanced through clear (and reinforced) TDE philosophies which set out the ethos and values of the TDE. This, in turn, allows for the development of shared mental models between stakeholders, which supports the development of congruence and alignment between all parties.

All of this background leads us to our first study this quarter, which focuses on examining the perceptions of athletes, coaches, and parents within European TDEs. Such a study is important as the majority of research on TDEs focuses on the perspective of athletes—meaning that the thoughts of two major stakeholder groups are often not considered. Five sporting organisations in Europe were asked to provide their coaches, athletes, and athlete parents with a copy of the TDEQ. Overall, 591 athletes, 759 parents or guardians, and 134 coaches completed the questionnaire. The participants came from 27 different sports across five countries, ensuring a decent variety of responses.

Overall, these European TDEs were rated positively. A focus on long-term development was the highest rated factor, which is positive as such a focus is associated with lower rates of burnout and the meeting of athlete needs. Coaches and parents can seek to create a long-term development focus by prioritizing development over results, and portraying mistakes as an opportunity to learn, as well as using learning-focused language and utilizing planning strategies like individual athlete development plans. These TDEs also scored highly for Holistic Quality Preparation, which examines psycho-social processes such as wellbeing, care for life outside of sport, and developing mental toughness. There is some early research which suggests that training load is negatively associated with high scores in this area, which means that overall training load management and monitoring may be important for creating an effective TDE. The lowest scoring aspect of these TDEs was in relation to an athlete’s social network, which relates to athlete access to, and coach communication with, a multidisciplinary performance support team. The low scores in this study may be due to a lack of access to such performance support teams, as well as coaches not seeing value in, and therefore failing to engage with, a performance support team.

Comparing between the three stakeholder groups, coaches tended to rate TDEs the highest, and parents tended to score them the lowest. This could be because coaches have a better understanding of the TDE in which they are operating, and may also have a more global, long-term view of what a good TDE looks like. In comparison, athletes (and their parents) may typically take more of a short-term view, with a focus on results in the short- and medium-term. Parents are also typically “outside” of the TDE, meaning they are less aware of what is happening within it (and why). A challenge for coaches in ensuring that parents are adequately informed as to what their TDE is, and why; including the parents within the TDE; and ensuring that the key messages are being coherently delivered when the athlete is away from the coach. By taking these recommendations on board, coaches can ensure the environment in which they are developing athletes is best suited to their overall holistic development, setting them up for success later in life.

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