Identifying and Recruiting Talent: Just One Small Part of Player Development
Dave Simeone
Program Director – Sereno Soccer Club
The overwhelming trend has been towards digging deeper and deeper into the youth game by starting younger and younger. These efforts are aimed at discovering the next Freddie Adu, Michele Akers, Bobby Convey or Shannon Boxx. While evaluating, identifying and recruiting talent is important it is only the first step on the road to the final and finished product.
Talent, ability and an aptitude to do something well is just the beginning and only a starting point. What happens to talent, aptitude and ability over the course of a player’s participation in the game is another story altogether. That phenomenon is referred to as development.
After years of tried and proven as well as tried and failed methods of sport specific talent identification models there should be a highly reliable means to predict a talented player’s evolution and continued development. It would be interesting to follow a group of identified “talents” from eight or nine years of age to sixteen or seventeen years of age. We’d find a large group of players that were identified and touted as “talented” future stars who never reached their potential. Conversely there would also be another collection of players who were considered “average” as youngsters but perhaps over-achieved and as senior players between sixteen or seventeen blossomed into brilliant performers beyond the youth game and into college and beyond.
Talent is complex and is more than just the obvious physical athletic characteristics of strength, power, speed or the playing qualities demonstrated with technical skill or tactical decision making. Talent is never evident in every young player at the same time in their young lives nor will it surge to fruition at the same rate.
Talent can be transient, temporary and ephemeral especially at the youth level. Quite simply young players feel the effects of more changes physically and psychologically that impacts their performance and their perceived talent.
It’s all about what happens in between identification, recruiting and the finished product that makes the difference. That is called experience. Experience includes the sum of all that affects talent; competition, a training environment, social factors, human growth, and of course coaching. If the best that coaching can do is to detect talent and create a recruiting conduit then the process of player development is left to find its own way. The coach must do more than recognize when talent is performing, when it is struggling but unaffected by more time on the bench than in the game or more frequently subjected to being on the receiving end of another tirade while the coach conclusively decides that “there’s got to be a better player out there”. There’s even the instance when it might be timely to distance ourselves from the hard truth that in the beginning the same coach selected this youngster as the next true marvel. How these “assessments” can go from one extreme to the other in such a short span of time is revealing.
Talent and performance can vary and talent beneath the surface can go undetected. It can happen to the best of players as they are passing through youth soccer. It has happened to those that eventually did more than excel. Jurgen Klinsman, former German international, was so average a talent as a youngster that his youth coach encouraged Jurgen to learn the details and expertise of being a baker in his father’s bakery since he had no chance of being an accomplished soccer player. In the end nothing was further from the truth as Klinsman made huge contributions to the results the German men’s team enjoyed internationally as well as his impact in the professional game. Klinsman accomplished these achievements because of what he had on the inside rather than his perceived talent at that time. Recently he’s been hired as the Head Coach by the DFB to coach the German National Team. This is at a time when Germany hopes his experience and influence can play a major role in getting them back to being a force in the international game once again.
The real issue is that it is, in part, a failure and shortcoming on the part of the coach. Klinsman was forced to dig deep and find how important soccer was to him, where it fit into his life and priorities. This required Klinsman to assume more responsibility for his development and tested his willingness to overcome the incorrect assessment of one coach.
It does have something to do with what a player is willing to put into the process of their development, what they are prepared to endure; weather, injuries, rehabilitation, adapt to coaching styles, playing / training against challenging competition or the inevitable streak where performance is just not good. Jurgen Klinsman is living proof. It’s not realistic to measure the wear with all of an individual in only the good times. If sport builds character then competition, adversity reveal character. This is all part of the psychological dimension. There are a number of common factors that are prevalent during the career of successful elite player. If the physical, technical and decision making aspects can be somewhat quantified then some attention must be given to commitment, character, honesty, integrity, desire, responsibility, discipline, confidence and dealing with adversity.
If these are qualities in successful players then I wonder if the same can be said of successful clubs. Clubs demonstrating commitment whether players are in “A”, “B” or “C” team and during times they struggle. Clubs being honest and acting responsibly when evaluating young talent and talking to both players and parents about where they believe that talent fits into the club. There’s no doubt that this also involves integrity. With everyone living and reveling in the here and now, fast track, quick fix, week to week result oriented mentality of youth soccer there’s lots of room for coaches and clubs to take a greater responsibility to affect a change in player development.
