No abstract

Objectives Youth sport programs have been designed to facilitate positive development of young people by teaching life skills. It is unclear which life skills are needed by adolescents and which life skills should be included in youth sport programs. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore how life skills are defined, which life skills British adolescent athletes need, and which life skills are the most important. Method Nineteen adolescent athletes, ten coaches, four experts in sport psychology (pilot group) and five graduate students (pilot group) participated in a series of focus groups. An inductive analysis revealed how life skills are defined, which life skills British adolescent athletes need, and of these skills which are the most important. Results Life skills were defined as ranges of transferable skills needed for everyday life, by everybody, that help people thrive. Participants described the need for interpersonal skills including social skills, respect, leadership, family interactions, and communication. Personal skills including organization, discipline, self-reliance, goal setting, managing performance outcomes, and motivation, were also reported. Social skills were identified as the most important life skills. Conclusions In conclusion, findings add support to existing positive youth development research while adding an alternative insight into which life skills should be built into youth sport programs.

Talent transfer (TT) is a recently formalised process used to identify and develop talented athletes by selecting individuals who have already succeeded in one sport and transferring them to another. Despite the increasing popularity of TT amongst national organisations and sport governing body professionals, however, there is little empirical evidence as to its efficacy or how it may be most efficiently employed. Accordingly, this investigation was designed to gain a deeper understanding of the effectiveness and underlying mechanisms of TT, achieved through a two-part study. Stage 1 provided a quantitative analysis of the incidence and distribution or, in this respect, epidemiology of TT, finding the most popular transfer to be sprinting to bobsleigh, with an average transfer age of 19 years. Stage 2 scrutinised the TT process and explored the specific cases revealed in stage 1 by examining the perceptions of four sport science support specialists who had worked in TT settings, finding several emergent themes which, they felt, could explain the TT processes. The most prominent theme was the psychosocial mechanism of TT, an aspect currently missing from TT initiatives, suggesting that current TT systems are poorly structured and should redress their approach to develop a more integrated scheme that encompasses all potential mechanisms of transfer.

No abstract

The purposes of the current study were to identify mental toughness profiles in adolescent cricketers and examine differences between these profiles on developmental assets and negative emotional states. A sample of 226 community cricketers (125 New Zealanders and 101 Australians; male n = 210) aged between 10 and 18 years (M(age) = 14.41 years; SD = 2.11) completed a multisection, online survey containing measures of mental toughness, developmental assets, and negative emotional states. The results of hierarchical (Ward's method) and nonhierarchical (k means) cluster analyses revealed three mental toughness profiles characterized by low, moderate, and high levels of all five mental toughness assets (i.e., affective intelligence, desire to achieve, self-belief, attentional control, resilience). Those cricketers with high levels of mental toughness reported possession of more developmental assets and lower levels of negative emotional states when compared with cricketers with the moderate levels of mental toughness. No statistically significant differences existed between the moderate and low levels of mental toughness profiles. These findings provided preliminary evidence to suggest that mental toughness might be viewed not only from the traditional view of optimal performance but also from a stance that may represent a contextually salient representation of thriving in youth sport settings.