Read Online The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance by David Epstein - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: David Epstein
Tags: Non-Fiction
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on measures of general athleticism. Schneider’s expectation was that tennis-specific skills acquired through practice—like the accuracy with which a player could return a ball back to a specific target—would have predictive value for how highly ranked the children would be as adults. And he was correct. When the researchers eventually fit their data to the actual rankings of the players later on, the children’s tennis-specific skill scores predicted 60 to 70 percent of the variance in their eventual adult tennis ranking. But another finding surprised Schneider.
The tests of general athleticism—for example, a thirty-meter sprint and start-and-stop agility drills—influenced which children would acquire the tennis-specific skills most rapidly. “When we omitted these motor abilities, our model no longer fit the ranking data,” Schneider says. “So we said, okay, we have to keep that in our model.” In other words, over the five years of the study, the kids who were better all-around athletes were better at acquiring tennis-specific skills. As with the study that examined depth perception and the ability to learn a catching skill, superior hardware was speeding the download of tennis-skill software. Schneider’s study received significant attention in Germany, but because it was published in German, it garnered scant notice in the rest of the world.
Ten years later, Schneider replicated the entire study with one hundred more child tennis players. He was not nearly so fortunate with the second sample—no future world top one hundreds this time around. But the finding that general athleticism impacted tennis skill acquisition held strong. “This may not be generalizable to other sports,” says Schneider, who later became president of the International Society forthe Study of Behavioral Development. “But for tennis, I think it’s a rather stable phenomenon.”
Among the children in the original study were two, both under twelve when the testing began, who would eventually become pretty familiar in the tennis world: Boris Becker and Steffi Graf, two of the most dominant players in history. “We called Steffi Graf the perfect tennis talent,” Schneider says. “She outperformed the others in tennis-specific skills and basic motor skills, and we also predicted from her lung capacity that she could have ended up as the European champion in the 1500-meters.”
Graf was at the top of every single test, from measures of her competitive desire to her ability to sustain concentration to her running speed. Years later, when Graf was the best tennis player in the world, she would train for endurance alongside Germany’s Olympic track runners.
•
The most thorough tracking of athletes from youth en route to the pros tells yet another hardware-plus-software story. As part of the “Groningen talent studies,” four scientists from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands tested soccer players who were in pro-team development pipelines each year for a decade, starting in 2000 with twelve-year-old boys.
The Netherlands, despite a population of just 16.7 million, is a juggernaut in the planet’s most popular team sport. The country has made the final game of the World Cup three times, including in 2010, and all of the Netherlands’ professional teams have talent development programs for youth players. By 2011, sixty-eight of the hundreds of players studied had reached the professional level, nineteen of them in the Eredivisie, the premier professional league in the Netherlands.
When the study began, “I would go down on my knees and ask, ‘Please can we do the testing with your players?’” recalls Marije Elferink-Gemser, of the University of Groningen’s Center for Human Movement Sciences. But the work has turned out to be so valuable in predictingwhich players will develop best in the long term that “now clubs are coming to us and asking if we can also test their players,” Elferink-Gemser says.
The tests of general athleticism—for example, a thirty-meter sprint and start-and-stop agility drills—influenced which children would acquire the tennis-specific skills most rapidly. “When we omitted these motor abilities, our model no longer fit the ranking data,” Schneider says. “So we said, okay, we have to keep that in our model.” In other words, over the five years of the study, the kids who were better all-around athletes were better at acquiring tennis-specific skills. As with the study that examined depth perception and the ability to learn a catching skill, superior hardware was speeding the download of tennis-skill software. Schneider’s study received significant attention in Germany, but because it was published in German, it garnered scant notice in the rest of the world.
Ten years later, Schneider replicated the entire study with one hundred more child tennis players. He was not nearly so fortunate with the second sample—no future world top one hundreds this time around. But the finding that general athleticism impacted tennis skill acquisition held strong. “This may not be generalizable to other sports,” says Schneider, who later became president of the International Society forthe Study of Behavioral Development. “But for tennis, I think it’s a rather stable phenomenon.”
Among the children in the original study were two, both under twelve when the testing began, who would eventually become pretty familiar in the tennis world: Boris Becker and Steffi Graf, two of the most dominant players in history. “We called Steffi Graf the perfect tennis talent,” Schneider says. “She outperformed the others in tennis-specific skills and basic motor skills, and we also predicted from her lung capacity that she could have ended up as the European champion in the 1500-meters.”
Graf was at the top of every single test, from measures of her competitive desire to her ability to sustain concentration to her running speed. Years later, when Graf was the best tennis player in the world, she would train for endurance alongside Germany’s Olympic track runners.
•
The most thorough tracking of athletes from youth en route to the pros tells yet another hardware-plus-software story. As part of the “Groningen talent studies,” four scientists from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands tested soccer players who were in pro-team development pipelines each year for a decade, starting in 2000 with twelve-year-old boys.
The Netherlands, despite a population of just 16.7 million, is a juggernaut in the planet’s most popular team sport. The country has made the final game of the World Cup three times, including in 2010, and all of the Netherlands’ professional teams have talent development programs for youth players. By 2011, sixty-eight of the hundreds of players studied had reached the professional level, nineteen of them in the Eredivisie, the premier professional league in the Netherlands.
When the study began, “I would go down on my knees and ask, ‘Please can we do the testing with your players?’” recalls Marije Elferink-Gemser, of the University of Groningen’s Center for Human Movement Sciences. But the work has turned out to be so valuable in predictingwhich players will develop best in the long term that “now clubs are coming to us and asking if we can also test their players,” Elferink-Gemser says.
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