COMPETITION EXPERIENCE, RELATIVE AGE EFFECT AND AVERAGE AGE OF THE SENIOR WORLD EVENTS’ MEDAL-WINNING BASKETBALL PLAYERS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24193/subbeag.65(3).18Keywords:
talent selection, competition experience, FIBA, basketball players, sport career.Abstract
The International Basketball Federation (FIBA) has changed its youth competition system in 2004, and due to this regulation, many players had the chance to compete every year at youth level and later, to elevate to the top. The purpose of our study was to inspect those medal-winning European basketball players who competed in the past 19 senior basketball world events. We analysed the tendencies of selection by dissecting the set-up of successful senior national teams. We investigated each one of the 281 European basketball players who won a medal during the analysed period (2000-2019). We collected data from the archive page of FIBA. Our goal was to see whether there was a relation between the youth competition experience and the minutes spent in senior world events. We used the Cramer Association Coefficient, Relative Age Effect and average age were also inspected. We found that participation in the national youth tournaments is important but not the most exclusive factor of selection. There are opportunities for success in the adult national teams for players who have covered alternative sports careers – the factor of national youth experience is not exclusive. We suppose that head coaches utilize older and more experienced players on the Olympic Games, the average ages of successful Olympic medal-winner teams are higher than other world events’ medallists. Despite the fact that we were not able to find statistically proven and associative relationship between national youth recruitment eligibility and the minutes in game spent by successful adult players, further research could be gap fillers in exploring key factors in adulthood efficiency.References
Baker, J., & Farrow, D. (Eds.), (2015). Routledge handbook of sport expertise. New York: Routledge.
Barreiros, A., Côté, J., & Fonseca, A. M. (2014). From early to adult sport success: Analysing athletes' progression in national squads. European Journal of Sport Science, 14(1), 178-182.
Barry M. Staw, Ha Hoang (1995): Sunk Costs in the NBA: Why Draft Order Affects Playing Time and Survival in Professional Basketball. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40, no. 3., 474-494.
Brouwers, J., De Bosscher, V., & Sotiriadou, P. (2012) An examination of the importance of performance in youth and junior competition as an indicator of later success in tennis Sport. Management Review 15 (4), 461-475.
CIES Football Observatory Monthly Report n32 (2018) Is there an optimum squad age to win in football? Retrieved 2 May 2020, from https://football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/mr/mr32/en/.
CIES Football Observatory Monthly Report n38 (2018) Player turnover strategies in the five major European leagues. Retrieved 2 May 2020, from https://football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/mr/mr38/en/.
Collins, D., & MacNamara, Á. (2012). The rocky road to the top: Why talent needs trauma. Sports Medicine, 42, 907–914. doi:10.1007/BF03262302.
Côté, J., Lidor, R., & Hackfort, D. (2009). ISSP Position Stand: To Sample or to Specialize? Seven postulates about youth sport activities that lead to continued participation and elite performance. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 7, 7-17.
Delorme N, Chalabaev A, Raspaud M. (2011) Relative age is associated with sport dropout: evidence from youth categories of French basketball. Scand J Med Sci Spor.; 21(1):120–8. 17.
Delorme N, Raspaud M. (2009) The relative age effect in young French basketball players: a study on the whole population. Scand J Med Sci Spor.; 19(2):235–42.
Ericsson, K. A., (2003) Development of Elite Performance and Deliberate Practice. An Update from the Perspective of the Expert Performance Approach, in: Starkes, J. and Ericsson, K. A., eds., Expert Performance in Sports: Advances in Research on Sport Expertise, Human Kinetics, Champaign, IL, 49-84.
Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The story of success. Little, Brown and Company, Hachette UK.15-68.
I Ibañez SJ, Mazo A, Nascimento J, Garcıa-Rubio J. (2018) The relative age effect in under-18 basketball: Effects on performance according to playing position. PLoS ONE.; 13(7):1–11.
Johnston K, Wattie N, Schorer J, Baker J. (2017) Talent Identification in Sport: A Systematic Review. Sports Medicine; 48(1):97–109.
Lopez de Subijana C, Lorenzo J. (2019) Relative Age Effect and Long-Term Success in the Spanish Soccer and Basketball National Teams. Journal of Human Kinetics. 65(1):197–204.
McCarthy, N., & Collins, D. (2014). Initial identification & selection bias versus the eventual confirmation of talent: Evidence for the benefits of a rocky road? Journal of Sports Sciences, 32, 1604–1610. doi:10.1080/ 02640414.2014.908322.
Reilly, T., Williams, A. M., Nevill, A. and Franks, A., (2000) A Multidisciplinary Approach to Talent Identification in Soccer. Journal of Sport Sciences, 18, 695-702.
Sampaio, J., Drinkwater, E. J., & Leite, N. M. (2010). Effects of season period, team quality and playing time on basketball players’ game related statistics. European Journal of Sport Science, 10(2), 141–149. doi:10.1080/17461390903311935.
Schumacher, Y. O., Mroz, R., Mueller, P., Schmid, A., & Ruecker, G. (2006). Success in elite cycling: A prospective and retrospective analysis of race results. Journal of Sports Sciences, 24(11), 1149–1156. doi:10.1080/02640410500457299.
Steingröver et al. (2016) Does Relative Age Affect Career Length in North American Professional Sports. Sports Medicine Open 2:18. DOI 10.1186/s40798-016-0042.
Studies on the topic of selection in talent management (2009), ed.: J. Bognár, Budapest, 13-42.
Thiel, A., & Mayer, J. (2009). Characteristics of voluntary sports club’s management: A sociological perspective. European Sport Management Quarterly, 9(1), 81–98. doi:10.1080/16184740802461744.
Till, K., Cobley, S., O’Hara, J., Morley, D., Chapman, C., & Cooke, C. (2015): Retrospective analysis of anthropometric and fitness characteristics associated with long-term career progression in Rugby League. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, May 2015 18(3):310-314, DOI: doi.org/10.1016/j.jsams.2014.05.003.
Torbjørn Lorentzen (2017) Allocation of playing time within team sports – a problem for discussion. Open Review of Educational Research, 4:1, 20-32. DOI: 10.1080/23265507.2016.1266694.
Vaeyens, R., Güllich, A., Warr, C. R. and Philippaerts, R., (2009) Talent Identification and Promotion Programmes of Olympic Athletes. Journal of Sport Sciences, 27(13), 1367-1380.
Wiersma, L.D. (2000). Risks and benefits of youth sport specialization: Perspectives and recommendations. Paediatric Exercise Science, 12, 13–22.
Ziv, G., Lidor, R., Arnon, M. (2010): Predicting team rankings in basketball: The questionable use of on-court performance statistics. International Journal of Performance Analysis of Sport, 10, 103-114.
www.archive.fiba.com
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2020 Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Educatio Artis Gymnasticae
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
