Language games and blurry terminology: Can clarity enhance athlete development?

Abstract

This perspective focuses on the need for researchers and practitioners to carefully consider the clarity and consistency of their language in the context of athlete development. Evidence supporting a lack of congruency in the way certain terms and expressions are defined, understood, and operationalized continues to accumulate, highlighting the importance of this area for sport stakeholders and the potential looming crises. In systems that regularly rely on precision and accuracy, it will be critical that all involved in the co-creation of knowledge generation and application carefully consider terms that may further complicate athlete development practices. We highlight some potentially blurry terms and draw attention to potential avenues for future research.

Maturity-Associated Polygenic Profiles of under 12–16-Compared to under 17–23-Year-Old Male English Academy Football Players

“…This also meant that yearly age group comparisons could not be conducted, which may have added greater context to the findings. Building this research base with studies using transparent and consistent methodologies will be important to facilitate research synthesis approaches in the future [43,44]. Whilst we are confident in the findings due to previous research showing strong relationships between the variants investigated and maturity, the actual maturation status of participants was not known, and future research may be improved by including this measurement.…”

Experienced academy soccer coaches’ perspectives on players’ skilfulness

“…Indeed, most skill assessment research (and the researchers who conducted it) has not stated how the skill construct was viewed. Doing so will help bridge the gap between skill acquisition theory and practice (Johnston et al 2023). For example, how academy coaches' views match up to objective performance data is unclear.…”

“…So, it is perhaps unsurprising that many existing youth soccer skill assessments are not part of the coach's decision-making process. Of particular concern was that researchers rarely stated how they conceptualised soccer skill, meaning that it is challenging to ascertain the value of the outcome measure (Impellizzeri et al 2021;Johnston et al 2023). Indeed, skill perspectives vary in the motor behaviour and expertise literature, with some researchers preferring an information-processing perspective (Schmidt 2003;Schmidt et al 2018) and others having an ecological dynamics view (Clark 1995;Woods et al 2021).…”

Talent inclusion: An imperfect solution to genetic testing in sport - Response to commentaries

“…An interesting insight was also offered by Pickering (2023) regarding the motivation behind practitioners choosing to implement genetic testing. The author recalled that during their time working at a DTC genetic testing company, some practitioners mentioned that they were not primarily interested in the results of the test, rather, the primary purpose of the test was to instil a belief in athletes that the prac- is already poorly understood (Baker et al, 2024;Johnston et al, 2023;McAuley, Baker, et al, 2022), so the implications of being (prematurely) categorised with another metric (i.e., genetic profile) likely adds fuel to the fire.…”