Why How We Select Young Sporting Talent Is Probably All Wrong
The Real Science of Sport Podcast
00:00
The Complexity of Maturity
In South Africa, we have three age-grade competitions where you pick national teams. One of them is 13, crazy, 16 also and then 18, which is I think where you should do it. But only about 20%, 24 to be precise, of the players who are picked in our best under 13 crop are also in our bestunder 18 crop. That's not even into adulthood. Then it'll drop off way more, right? Because there's a massive bottleneck from youth into adulthood. There's only 100 professional contracts in South Africa and rugby. Only 24% go from 13 to 18, which means that 76% vanish somewhere in the system. They're not there anymore.
Transcript
Play full episode
