Identifying Exceptional Athletic Prowess and Ability
Proper Selection of Athletic Potential
Within the field of athletics, there is a large financial incentive for both scouts and athletes from college scouts looking for a high performing player and a college student looking for a sponsorship, there is a lot of pressure placed on scouts to determine player potential. While inate ability is not always the most deterministic factor in determining the success of an athlete, athletes with both natural talent, determination, interest, and luck will have the greatest opportunity for athletic success within a sport.
Although, determination is difficult to measure, scouts can examine player performance and through other processes gauge other important factors that can increase an athletes ability to strive towards success.
Determining important factors in athletic perfomance
In this analysis, student data on the atheletic performance of the Malaysian SEGAK physical fitness test was taken for children of the age of 7. In this test, four metrics were measured: power, a standing broad jump where students jumped as far as possible while landing on two feet without falling; speed, a twenty-meter sprint; flexibility, sit and reach; and coordination, a hand wall test where the student throws a ball at a target on a wall that is 1 meter high at a distance of 1 meter, throwing and catching with the dominant hand first and then the non-dominant hand.
When examining participant traits and performance:
- It was determined that qualities such as weight, height, and BMI were statistically relavent to the performance metrics; however, their correlation coefficient was within [|.15|] meaning that there is essentially no relationship between a students traits and their performance metrics.
- There were relationships between the different performance metrics, such as weak positive correlations between power and coordination, and weak negative correlations between power and speed.
- A scout can use clustering methods to determine groups of candidates that follow similar behavior in performance, and weighted averages to emphasize qualities that are more important within their given sport.
Overall Patterns in Performance and Physical Qualities
In the correlogram above, the first thing that can be noticed is that at this age there is relatively little difference between overall female and male performance. However, there are differences in speed and power between males and females conducting the SEGAK. Since, the individuals performing the test have not gone through puberity as they are 7 to 7.1; it can be assumed that biological differences which occur through natural development are not influencing performance.
When looking at the correlation statistics, relationship between weight and power, speed, and coordination appear to be statistically significant the varying degrees, but despite this, the correlation coefficient is between -.15 and.15 for the combination of weight and the performance factors which mean that there is an extremely low correlation to no correlation between weight and the performance metrics.
Once again, despite having statistically significant relationships between height and other performance metrics, the correlation coefficent is relatively close to zero meaning that the relationship between the variables can be considered negligable.
As body mass index is a mathematical transformation of height and weight, there does exist statistically significant relationship; however, the correlation coefficient remains far too low to be an insight into performance metrics.
Although the relationship between a child's performance and the physical traits of height and weight can be negligable, despite being statistically significant, there appears to be a stronger relationship between the measurements of performance.
Residential Location as a Proxy to Exposure to Physical Activity
Based on the correlogram, further exploration was done on the different performance metrics and there is a clear positive and negative relationship between the different metrics. For instance, there appears to be a slight negative relationship between speed and power while there is a slight positive relationship between flexibility and power which means that as the kids performing the standardized physical fitness test show more power they will likely show more strength.
Thus, depending on the sport, certain performance metrics may be more synergisic with other athletic qualities. This can mean that if the a scout is looking for a child to perform in a sport such as gymanstics, they can choose individuals who have a high degree of flexibility and power.
A Table to Explore the Athletic Measurements of Students
The total score is a summation of all of the standardized performance metrics.
Clustering Of Student Performance Metrics