Tag: Baseball

In professional sports where teams are subject to a “draft” system, it is common to talk about a “window of opportunity”, i.e. a year or two when the team has the realistic opportunity to win the title owing to the talent, maturity and experience of their players. For many teams “outside the window”, coaches and management will often talk about the “rebuilding phase” – a period where the team is re-building their playing ranks with the aim of giving them the opportunity to win again sometime in the future. This article looks at the concept of “rebuilding” and challenges it as a valid philosophy in professional sport.

Every now and again, a client will ask me to come up with a new way of doing something to help them achieve their performance goals.

In recent years, a real focus for me has been developing innovative talent identification, recruitment and retention strategies for professional sporting teams.

These next three posts will outline a concept called the Player Potential Profile – an integrated, practical approach to Talent Identification and Recruitment in High Performance Sport.

There is a tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea who have never seen modern technology, who could not even imagine using the latest electronic tools, who can not comprehend western society concepts of computing, social media, high speed Internet links, laser technology or satellite navigation.

This tribe, believes that the best way – the only way – the way everyone must adopt  to cut down a tree is to make an axe by lashing a sharp rock to a piece of wood. This knowledge has been passed down from generation to generation for centuries….this tribe knows for certain that the only way to cut down a tree is to use a hand made stone ax.

And then, one day, through the forest, comes a man from the USA carrying a chain saw……. 

The concept of Talent Identification – TID for short – makes sense.

Do some standardised testing and screening of lots of kids, find the ones who can run faster, run further, jump longer, stretch better than the rest and bingo- you found talent!

It all grew out of the now “mythical” talent identification systems of the old Eastern Block (and more recently China) – and the countless stories we have all heard for the past 30 years about how the centralised government systems put every child in the nation through a series of TID testing protocols and then funnelled them in to the specific sports where their talent was most likely to be developed to its full potential.

But in the western world, in spite of the hundreds of millions of dollars thrown at TID in Australia, the US, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and Western Europe, with the exception of a few minor and specialised sports – it has failed and failed badly.