Edinburgh Napier University

  Background
It is well known that parents play an important role in the process of athlete development, often acting as critical stakeholders in facilitating the success or derailment of an athlete. However, this process is typically left to chance and often parents are kept “at arm’s length”. A recent sportscotland initiative to better understand and support parents of pathway athletes has led to the generation of a strong evidence base within the Scottish context. This has enabled the development of academically rigorous resources designed to support and educate parents in the form of an interactive online platform. This understanding and the associated resources can potentially act as a point of reference for coaches and NGBs to help them engage with parents positively and integrate them effectively in the development process. However, there is scope to extend this work further to develop, test and evaluate a system to facilitate ongoing reflection, communication, and development within Scottish talent development environments (TDEs), that is scalable across the national sporting landscape.

Proposed Project
A major challenge for those involved in talent development pathways is creating systematic and regular opportunities for reflection, discussion, sharing of good practice and designing improvements moving forward. In line with this challenge, Martindale and colleagues developed the Talent Development Environment Questionnaire (TDEQ), a tool which measures key features of effective practice (e.g., Martindale et al., 2005, 2007, 2010). This engages different stakeholders (e.g., athletes, parents) to provide feedback in a structured way based on their observations of these key features. This offers coaches structured, evidence based, and context specific feedback that can be used as a basis for reflection. This process also provides a mechanism for coaches to discuss and share examples of the strengths of their environments and ideas related to those areas that they feel can be improved.
In short, this work aims to develop a mechanism through which a number of important processes can be driven effectively and efficiently across a national sporting landscape, including 1) staff regularly communicating and reflecting on their practice, 2) staff having access to evidence that can help them improve and monitor their environments, 3) sharing of good practice and innovation across talent pathways, and finally 4) bottom-up coach resource and coach education development