Leaders, coaches and practitioners who aspire to excellence typically recognise the imperative for life-long learning. Given the diversity and complexity we encounter when working with humans there is an ongoing need to assimilate new information. Within a professional context as with other aspects of our lives we figure out how the world works through inquiry and sense-making. It all begins with a question. Young children ask questions constantly as they strive to discover more about the world around them and how things work. They then proceed to make sense of things and this is based not just on what answers they were given but also their own experiences and ongoing explorations as they move through the world. What is striking is how much of this is done independently. As grown ups we can learn much from this approach. If we wish see the world as it is and to figure out how things operate in reality it follows we must enlist the same tools of inquiry and sense-making.

What are the key principles of youth athlete development and how do we best structure this?

Beyond the disputes on the specifics of the LTAD model, I think the term ‘Long-Term Athlete Development’ describes each of the most salient principles.

So the first principle is thinking long-term. To give the example of a national development programme, we should not be unduly concerned about winning junior-level competitions. Our approach should rather reflect the ultimate mission, which is to produce athletes who are capable of winning on the world stage as a senior.

As the march to high performance systems continues we have yet to resolve how to unite all parties to the cause. The estrangement between sports science (and medicine) and those operating in the field has proven to be a recalcitrant problem. Just as there is an ongoing divide between academic research and applied practice, achieving alignment between support staff in different disciplines and the coaching staff (not to mention the athlete as the ‘end user’) often proves to be elusive. Proponents of sports science and medicine often rail at how coaches and athletes seem reticent to adopt new findings and assimilate evidence-based practice, despite the merits presented in the research literature. Support providers commonly bemoan a lack of ‘buy in’ from the coaching staff, whereas researchers similarly cite a lack of compliance from athletes and coaches as thwarting their attempts to take interventions from the lab into the field. Here we will attempt to unravel these issues and explore some solutions to bring the respective parties together in our quest to unite the holy trinity of coach, support staff and researcher scientist.

The online world and social media in particular is overrun with self-proclaimed experts - we might call them virtual experts. But as with truth, real expertise is as rare as ever in the digital era (notwithstanding the aforementioned ‘instant expert’ social media phenomenon). One reason why true experts remain such a rare breed is that developing expertise is a complex and multifaceted process that takes many years and arguably is never complete. Even with unprecedented access to information, acquiring expertise is arguably no more straightforward, encompassing as it does not only the acquisition of theoretical understanding but also applied knowledge and practical skills across multiple areas. Most coaches and practitioners aspire to attaining real expertise and as most will testify this journey and the real learning begins only once we leave formal education and enter the profession. This distinction between education and learning is an important one when seeking to develop expertise, as we will explore. It is similarly crucial that we understand the true purpose of teaching and the role of teachers, master coaches and mentors in guiding the process. Finding enlightenment and the pursuit of mastery however remains the domain of the individual and it is as much a process of self-discovery as anything else. There are also a number of steps and various stages to this journey.

Sport never stands still. Whatever our context or chosen discipline, what constitutes a winning strategy is continually evolving. Trends emerge and endure through a process of natural selection. Conventions in coaching and the prevailing wisdom on ‘best practice’ similarly morph over time, albeit other influences are also often at play. Remaining at the cutting edge relies upon our ability to adapt faster than the opposition. Within our environment the challenge is to evolve what we do and how we do it to preserve a competitive advantage. Being attuned and responsive to the constantly shifting dynamics also allows us to adapt to new challenges, respond to emerging threats from rivals and accommodate unforeseen events that change the rules of the game.