Talent & The Krush Brain Game; Dr. Alex Roberts – Season Wrap Up #5

Coaching bias and how, as coaches, we tend to select athletes not based on talent, skill, or dedication but rather on how an athlete might fit into our personal coaching style.

I go Down Under to visit once again with Dr. Alex Roberts from the Department of Sports Coaching and Development at the School of Allied Health, Human Services and Sport at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He has done extensive work looking at this exact issue. We will discuss the art of athlete selection, how we must address the unique needs of athletes at different levels of development, look at the important difference between forecasting talent and selecting talent, and pose the hypothetical question, “What if we had a talent identification system for coaches?”

It was inevitable that our 2021 themes, talent, talent identification, and The Krush Brain Game, are on course to collide head on as we wrap up this year on Krush Performance. These three areas are connected in so many ways and as we work to connect all of the dots, we need to get to the very source of athlete development and player performance, our coaches.