Development Pathways

Pathways

Elite sport is becoming an increasingly popular path for youth athletes to strive towards. With sponsors investing a huge sum of money into clubs, teams and individual athletes; becoming a professional athlete is a much more appealing profession then what it used to be.  

Level of competition in today’s professional sporting leagues across the world has become higher and, therefore, to reach an elite level, young athletes have to invest their time training at younger ages (1). Therefore, the necessity to identify talented young athletes has increased (2).  

A talented youth athlete is defined as a young individual that stands out and performs above their peers during training and competition, they also hold key indicators that show they have the potential to reach elite level (3). 

To assure the rise to the top, Hockey Australia has identified clear and distinct talent identification and development pathways. The Australia national field hockey teams are one of Australia’s most successful elite sporting teams. They are the only Australian team in any sport to receive medals at the last six Olympic Games (1992–2012). Therefore, using techniques used for talent identification and pathways from the Kookaburra’s is an excellent way to strive for greatness and set up the future of the sport for hockey in India.  

Table 1. Chance of selection (4) 

	% chance of selection	# of hockey players in Australia
Kookaburra’s
Men’s	0.03%	59,000
Women’s	0.03%	47,000

As seen in Table 1. The road to selection is a long and hard road for youth athletes. It requires countless hours or training and competition, money, travel and some luck. It should be acknowledged that the chances of making the Australian national hockey side for both males and females is very small (see Table 1).  

Table 2. Junior development teams (4) 

	% chance of selection	# of hockey players in Victoria
Junior Victorian Development Team
Vikings (boys)	0.1%	16,600
Vipers (girls)	0.2%	7,100

Australia has got its talent identification down to a fine art. The table above shows the chance of selection for the junior development teams in Victoria, even though the chance of selection is still extremely slim, 95% of all Vikings and Vipers players have continued on to represent the country (5).