Realising Potential
Helping kids discover and make the most of their gifts
By definition, every young person is a work in progress. In childhood we are faced with seemingly endless possibilities. Children are all formless potential and the formative years are all about the process of becoming. Helping kids fulfil their potential through guidance and support constitutes the central mission of parents and coaches alike. For young people, youth sport can play an important role in this quest to be all that they could be across different facets of their life. Within the realm of sport, helping kids make the best use of their gifts is what talent development and youth sport is fundamentally concerned with.
The process of developing talent is about realising potential in both senses of the word. Part of the role of the grown ups is to help kids figure out where their talents might lie and discover what possibilities might be open to them. After all, what potential they might have in a given domain is not self-evident. Rather than simply being a matter of unleashing latent potential, kids must first gain a sense of what they might one day be capable of achieving.
Aptitude is clearly a significant factor. Kids will often find there are skills that they pick up quite readily and discover there are certain sports that they are innately able to play. The youth sport journey during the childhood years is essentially about sampling a range of sports to figure out what they might best to suited to. As their physical and athletic gifts are still developing and some may not become fully apparent until later on, the astute eye of a coach can be of great benefit in this regard.
Through this exploration kids will gain a sense of what potential avenues they might fruitfully explore. The question then becomes what sport(s) they have a genuine affinity for. Whilst various sports might capture their interest along the way, often this interest proves to be fleeting. Given that the journey typically takes years, the sport(s) that proves to have the most enduring fascination will be the most appropriate avenue to pursue long-term. This cannot be predicted in advance and the leading contender(s) will only tend to emerge over time.
The major theme of the middle part of the youth sports journey is narrowing the search. Over time, kids will naturally choose to prioritise spending time on certain pursuits in preference to others. As the grown-ups, we can help kids to be intentional in how they invest their time. Nevertheless, seeking to fulfil their potential in a given domain inevitably means neglecting to pursue other potential avenues. As such, the final selection of sports that kids choose to pursue is arrived at by a process of elimination.
As kids progress on the youth sports journey, practice and competition demands tend to increase and the logistics of participating in multiple sports becomes increasingly challenging. All the same, if they can be considered and selective in how they participate in their chosen sports, it is possible to buy some time so that the young athlete is able to keep their options open until they are ready to commit. Deferring the decision on which sport to invest all their efforts in to a more optimal time requires parents and those advising them to help ensure that the demands on their time do not become excessive to the extent that it forces a decision prematurely.
There is one final element that is often overlooked or otherwise neglected by young athletes and those advising them. For a young athlete to fulfil their genetic potential and make the most of their athletic gifts they require dedicated time and attention to physical preparation, especially during the critical phase of maturation that spans puberty and adolescence. Whilst aptitude in part depends on choosing your parents well, there are various capacities and capabilities that can be developed with training.
Strength training should be considered a non-negotiable for young female athletes to provide the necessary boost to avoid the adverse effects on performance and injury risk that otherwise occur downstream of the changes accompanying puberty. Equally, these years also present a uniquely advantageous time for young males to invest in dedicated dryland training - at no other time in their development will dryland training have such a dramatic and lasting impact on their physique and physical performance capacities. Alongside practice and competition commitments, the weekly schedule also needs to accommodate regular training such that aspiring young athletes are able to fulfil their potential.