The Holden Cup is far from a guaranteed path into first grade. Photo / Getty
The Holden Cup is far from a guaranteed path into first grade. Photo / Getty
Less than 10 per cent of those who play in NRL under-20s will graduate to first-grade football.
It's a sobering thought. A fraction of those who attend world youth athletics championships will represent New Zealand at a senior champs or Olympics.
It is why people like Rob Nichol of the Players' Association and former high-profile athlete manager Roger Mortimer see self-identity as one of the hot-button issues in sport today.
Mortimer believes too many sports programmes - whether run by franchises, clubs, schools or academies - did nothing for the development of the athlete outside of sport.
"The whole sense of identity of the boy or girl, their identity and ego, is around performance in sport," he says. "They only see themselves as a rugby player, cricketer, netballer, triathlete.
"Sports franchises in general do not give a shit about what happens to the athlete post-career. The scariest thing I see is we have a bunch of kids coming through who see themselves as nothing but rugby players."
Holistic development is seen as crucial, but here's the rub: in research done by Steve Hollings, a former Olympian, on which athletes made the leap from youth to senior ranks, a common factor was a 'single identity'.
"Those athletes who successfully transitioned admitted that it was difficult to try and manage education, work and training, and chose to make sacrifices in other life domains," Hollings wrote in a paper titled Why Some Do, Why Others Don't.
The lesson here is there is no silver bullet to sporting stardom, that much is obvious, but in a wider sense there is no absolute right way and plenty of wrong ways of trying to get there.
Craig Harrison is director of athlete development at AUT Millennium and is trying to change the paradigm on how we identify and develop talent.
"Most people get it wrong," he says. "They are selecting 'talent', which is often biased by Relative Age Effect and maturity levels.
"Once they're in that team or programme, they spend their season working towards outcome goals, not development goals. That season ends, the next one rolls around and they're selected again.
"What we need is multiple entry and exit points along the way, but that's difficult because of the way our systems are set up and coaches chase the 'win' rather than focusing on the development of their athletes and instilling great habits."
Harrison, who is married to Silver Ferns defender Anna Harrison, says he feels sorry for parents, who are often placed in difficult situations.
"They see decisions based on outcomes all the time. If they were to say, 'No, we want the programme to be based more around our child's development than winning', they would be going against the norm."
He said one solution for parents would be to ask schools in particular what their sporting philosophy is and what they can expect their child to have achieved by the time they leave.
"If most of them are honest, they'll say, 'Your son will be part of a 1st XV that wins a championship because that's what is important to us'. The parents might like that philosophy, or they might want their child to go to a school or club where they aim to use sport to develop the person rather than the short-term 'we'll win on Saturday'."
The old cliché is that sport builds character. That's wrong Harrison says, unless the programme allows it.
It is often pointed out what a fickle industry sport is; how the difference between success and failure can be one selector's opinion or an unlucky industry. Indeed, questions are asked all the time as to whether national sporting organisations should do more to protect their vulnerable.
Perhaps surprisingly, Mortimer does not believe so. In many respects, being a sportsperson is no different from being, say, a recording artist. One minute you might be flavour of the month, the next, for reasons that are not entirely explicable, nobody thinks you're cool any more.
But athletes, he says, should not view the end of their playing or competing careers as a scrapheap. There's coaching, media, personal training or any number of strands to this ever-growing, intensely complex, entertaining, enriching and frustrating 'industry' we call sport.
"It's the nature of sport," he says. "Athletes who don't make it can still have good careers in the industry."
Jacko Gill is one athlete who graduated from the youth ranks. Photo / Greg Bowker
On day one, we discussed birthdates and how being born at a certain time of year, with three months of age-group eligibility cut-offs, could provide inherent advantages.
In analysing why so few athletes progressed from the IAAF World Youth Championships to Junior World Champions to senior world champs, Dr Steve Hollings, a statistician with Athletics NZ, discovered RAE at work.
Of the 120 athletes (66 women, 54 men) who had competed at the WYC between 1999-2013, just 28 progressed to the world junior champs. Of that 120, just 10 have represented New Zealand at senior level.
"The marked relative-age effects in athletics exclude talented younger athletes from youth and junior championships and presumably discourage some younger athletes from continuing to the open championships. The consequences are a lower overall standard of performance and termination of the athletes' involvement in athletics before realising their full potential," Hollings wrote in a research paper.
"The RAE in athletics is based on the fact that the [WYC and WJC] championships cover two-year age ranges and are held in alternate years. The WJC are for men and women 19 years and under on December 31 in the year of competition, with a minimum age of 16 years. The WYC are for boys and girls 16 or 17 years old. Owing to the way the championships are scheduled, an athlete at the younger end of the age group at the WYC is disadvantaged, but has an age advantage when subsequently competing at the WJC."
