The better model?

14 April 2015 - 02:04 By Ross Tucker

When we watch the likes of Rory McIlroy, Roger Federer, Duane Vermuelen or AB de Villiers in action, we're seeing the culmination of hundreds of factors, call them ingredients, added in the right amounts at the right time by just the right people. Our inclination is to try to work backwards to understand their success so that we can purposefully build future champions. McIlroy, for example, took to golf exceptionally early, becoming World Champion in the 9-10 age group. His father was his first coach, and he was so convinced that his son would become a future champion that he placed a R4000 bet that 15-year-old Rory would win the Open within 10 years. At odds of 500/1, he made R2-million off that bet in 2014!McIlroy is one of the shining lights of a "start early, focus on one sport, and have supportive, possibly even obsessed parents" camp. Others are Tiger Woods, the Williams sisters and André Agassi, whose father had him hitting 5000 balls a day at the age of five. He grew to hate the sport, as he related in his excellent autobiography, Open, but did win eight Grand Slam titles.In the opposite corner you'll find Roger Federer, AB de Villiers, Michael Jordan and Tom Brady. You could describe them as being in the "keep your options open, and delay your final commitment to a sport" camp. All will have played their sport from an early age, but juggled it with others until they chose, usually relatively late in high school, the sporting career we know them for.For scientists and coaches in the world of developing young talent, this latter approach is the one that is known to be desirable, more likely to produce success, and ultimately better for the young athlete. As much as ambitious parents or children would want to emulate the results of Woods or McIlroy, they are what my friend and author David Epstein calls "unicorns" - so rare as to be almost irrelevant as a model to imitate.More importantly, there's evidence that children who specialise and train too early are more likely to get injured and burned out before they reach adulthood, and are actually less likely to be physically active as adults.However well-meaning, then, parents or coaches who push children to focus too young more often end up achieving exactly the opposite result - worse performance.The early specialisation narrative is pervasive though. It has been fuelled by a number of best-selling books, including Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which introduced the concept of 10000 hours of practice to become an expert. Gladwell is an outstanding story-teller, able to create enticing and provocative concepts using anecdotes and selectively filtered research evidence.The 10000-hour concept is one such example. It might have been beneficial had he (and others, to be fair) not bent it to become an aspirational "rule". The "rule" is that, to become an expert, a person needs to accumulate 10000 hours of deliberate training. It's a great rallying cry, a call to discipline and hard work, and the sporting equivalent of the "white picket fence" dream, because it says that as long as you work hard (and long) you can succeed, just like Tiger, just like Serena.Unfortunately, it also drives exactly the wrong behaviour- early specialisation - because those 10000 hours will take at least 15 years to achieve. That's assuming almost two hours of training a day, which would have to start before puberty. There is very little upside to taking that journey, other than the one in a million chance the child is like Rory. The more likely outcome is spectacular failure and the rejection of all sport.I worry that we in South Africa have committed too much to an early specialisation model, especially in our competitive school system. I frequently encounter well-meaning parents who want what is best for their children, but whose actions might be achieving the opposite result.We need to shift the mindset towards multiple-sport participation and more play with less structured training, and it is up to the schools to lead the way on this...

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