Transcript
Dave Collins
The thrust of our work I should say first has been mostly in the teaching of skills, the teaching, testing and developing of skills in young athletes. We developed a set of criteria, which draws heavily on the work of Terry Orlick that we call the PCDEs – the psychological characteristics of developing excellence. And that was really where we sort of came in sort of the mid-nineties in terms of saying ‘This is what someone needs to get them to the top’.
As we then started to extend that into looking at the Talent Development Environment or the TDE. We spotted that a lot of the talent systems, especially in the UK and elsewhere where there were lots of resources, were focused very much what might call a professional setting whereby you removed all the challenges – I think you guys might refer to that as snow ploughing – snow plough clearance certainly - remove all the challenges from the path of the young, developing athlete enabling her or him to focus on – on the challenge of the sport. And what we actually recognised was that that seemed to be a pretty counter productive approach so we came back with this idea which we published in sort of the late twenties that looked at The Rocky Road to Success. For a catchy title we went for ‘Why Talent Needs Trauma’. And since then that’s been a big thrust of our research, If you're a super champ and I'm a champ we might both encounter some challenges around say the growth spurt around thirteen/fourteen. It’s how well I cope with them but more importantly how well I learn from that and enhance my skills and my competence that I take into the next challenge. Does that make sense? So it’s not the incidence of challenge, it’s what I get out of it, what I learn from it and therefore what I bring to the next challenge because of course any pathway is a series of challenges that is the distinguishing characteristic, the biggest distinguishing characteristic between the super champs and the champs.