Talent pathways, and other fables
A response to a killer article about talent pathways in cricket
Issue #5 features talent pathways and development:
‘It’s a disgrace’: Cricket NSW slammed over pathways-first selection policy by Daanyal Saeed (2023)
Talent development in women’s cricket: Perceptions and practices of elite players and coaches by Alex Lascu and colleagues (2021)
Last week, Fox Sports featured a story about the cricket selection policies in one Australian state. Now, not every state in Australia would ever get this much attention, so for international and non-cricket readers, this bears unpacking. In Australia, there is an overrepresentation of international-level cricketers from one state (county): New South Wales (NSW). The talent development pathway in this state is revered, and kids from surrounding areas (such as the neighbouring Australian Capital Territory) travel hours to compete in NSW local cricket competitions just in the hopes of being ‘spotted’ or selected into the pathway.
Now, it seems this pathway is failing Cricket NSW, and the irony is not lost on me. There appears to be a selection bias towards the young cricketers who are products of the talent pathway. This is highlighted by a powerful quote in the story from former Australian fast bowler Stuart Clark:
“[Cricket NSW was] fascinated with picking 19-year-olds and not those who have earned the right to play.”
When I first read this article, the words ‘earned the right to play’ really struck me. What does this even mean? What do you have to do to earn the right to play?
We could ask the other cricketer featured in this article the exact same question.
Josh Brown in 2022 alone scored multiple centuries in the premier local competition in Brisbane, Queensland (including 100 in 34 balls) and accumulated 447 runs in the home and away fixtures alone. For anyone who knows him, we know this hasn’t “come out of nowhere” like the average commentator suggests. He’s been doing this since we were teenagers, and personally, I avoided bowling to him at all costs 😅
It is worth noting here that playing cricket for your local club in the ‘grade’ competition (amateur senior cricket competition) comes with an entire subculture of memes - as exemplified by the success of The Grade Cricketer podcast. One of these running jokes is the idea that you’re only ever a few centuries (100’s) away from being picked in the Australian Mens Cricket Team. How many centuries, the jury is still out on, but if you start in second grade, just below the best amateur cricketers in your state/county, the idea is that one or two centuries get you picked in first grade, a few centuries there gets you elevated to play for your state/county, and then a few more at this level has them calling you the next big thing and touring with the Australian team.
It took Josh Brown about 3 centuries in a T20 competition (which is unheard of) to finally earn a contract in the Big Bash competition (professional T20 Cricket league in Australia). For reference, there are only 120 balls bowled in total in a T20 match, and it often took Josh less than 50 balls to score 100 runs in those matches. While playing for the Brisbane Heat in the Big Bash League, his 62 runs off 23 balls launched him from relative obscurity to a household name.
The point here is that our “pathways” to the elite echelons of cricket have been broken for some time, and you never would have heard about it until Cricket NSW was the one to break down. I’ll feature this news article first, before I delve into the PhD thesis that I wrote on this topic.
What is the issue here, really? Is it picking 19 year olds instead of grown men who are performing well in the best competition available for amateur cricketers? Actually, it’s deeper than that.
The underlying issue here is the pathway system itself, which is something that sport science and talent development research has been saying for some time now. As it currently exists, it only provides additional support for cricketers who already fit the mould, the people who look like and play the game like people would ‘expect’. Some famous cricketers here make great examples: we would not have the Steve Smith of today, with all of his quirks and flare if he had been inducted into the pathway early, because he is just so different.
As one coach highlighted in the original article:
“There’s loads of players in first and second grade that could play Big Bash or first-class cricket tomorrow, who aren’t being seen because opinions about them are formed when they’re 13, 14, 15 years old,” the first-grade coach said. [emphasis added]
This is certainly something that I have seen as a cricket coach, and the worst part is that young athletes are acutely aware that they only have the ages of 12-15 to make a first impression. I’ll unpack the brevity of this another day.
There is nothing much you can do if you’re not fortunate enough to make an impression in the underage pathway program. As the article emphasises, it is these young cricketers who are benefiting from their early selection into the pathway all the way top adulthood, bypassing current local cricketers who are already demonstrating their ability to perform at the desired level. Why?
“They (Cricket NSW) feel like they’ve invested in players, and so feel obligated to select them,” said one general manager.
They are no longer seen as individuals, but as investments. They are costs spent that need to be returned in some way. All the specialist coaching and multi-million dollar facilities need to be justified in some way, and that comes from being able to add someone’s incredibly young age onto every accolade they achieve to reinforce just how worthwhile it was to support their development, because look what they have become.
This approach is centred on the notion that life is a process of fulfilling your potential, that there is a predetermined outcome that you are destined to achieve, and it is only through being filled with information from others and biological growth that you can reach this point in your development. This idea is worth a newsletter on its own, but I highly recommend Carl Woods and Keith Davids’ (2023) paper on this topic.
The obligation to select these pathway cricketers has meant that many cricketers who never fit the mould enough to enter the pathway before have next to no chance now, and they are also incredibly aware of their status.
“I kept getting told ‘we’re monitoring you’, but without any feedback or movement.”
At the end of the day, no matter how many training sessions you go to, no matter how many runs you score or wickets you take - you know, deep down as an athlete that there is more to it than that and somewhere along the way, someone else decided that you don’t have that. In response to this, one coach in the article called for “empathy for players that develop late”, the cricketers who are not the biggest, strongest and fastest at 12 years old and immediately brought into a talent pathway.
We need more than empathy here.
We need a systematic approach to create a genuinely nonlinear pathway that is responsive to the changes in performance over time, so that athletes can be elevated as they consistently perform and feel supported in the periods when they are not.
I am certainly not saying this is an easy task, it’s infinitely more complicated than the current approach to talent ‘development’ (placed in air quotes to reinforce how little long-term development is really the focus here). No doubt there exists a system somewhere with individual development plans that are conditionally formatted into traffic light colours (red, yellow and green) to indicate areas of improvement but without feedback, this is meaningless. Even more so, without the support and structures in place to genuinely assist the player in upskilling themselves, it is an increasingly pointless exercise.
There is not enough support beyond the facilities and ‘specialist’ coaching provided in a talent pathway to develop cricketers, especially those who have grown out of the underage programs (18+ years old). The premier amateur cricket competition as it exists now only provides a level of competition that challenges cricketers to continue their development in pursuit of weekend or season success by winning matches, but they cannot consolidate the learning opportunities they find along the way at training.
This was reinforced in my research into talent development for female cricketers, where coaches and players at the state and national level identified a growing divide in skills between amateur, state and national cricketers. Now obviously there should be some difference in skill between these levels of performance, but the divide means that cricketers coming through pathway programs and local competitions are falling behind in terms of skill development, and even with support and coaching, they are graduating junior or amateur cricket competitions without the skills they would ordinarily need to be promoted to the next level.
This would have been a monumental finding if it had not been overshadowed by other concerning themes in the research, including the ‘aimless’ talent pathway (no idea what each stage is trying to achieve) and impoverished training design used for skill development. We have absolutely no indication of what the ‘skills to be promoted to the next level’ are, because some coaches openly discussed that they base selections on a “wow” factor, “if you sort of judge it on your experience of what you’re seeing, you don’t have to meet certain criteria for pathway development.”
If you don’t have that wow factor at 13 years old, that’s unfortunate.
So not only is selection into the talent pathway predicated on early success as a child, it is also based on the gut feel of the selectors.
Things are starting to sound pretty grim at this point, so I wanted to leave you with a bit of hope - the kind of hope I felt when I finally got to watch Josh Brown take his power hitting to the Big Bash League.
How do we move forward from here?
Well, it depends on the worldview you want to take. If you believe that there is a pre-destined potential for people to fulfil, that talent is innate and some people have it and others don’t, and we don’t need systems or structures to help us be unbiased in our provision of support and development, then you don’t need to do anything.
But, on the off chance that you’re like me, and you believe that our pursuit of an end point, a destination where we can proclaim we have fulfilled our potential, is futile and misses the point, then we have some work to do.
I hope to see the day where sports invest in their ‘grassroots’ and mean it, because I believe that’s what it will take. When I say grassroots, I don’t mean the makeshift competitions that 6 year olds play in, although the fact that they’re playing games at that age is a somewhat positive move. I mean the local clubs, the volunteers, the coaches and parents who arrive every afternoon and spend their entire weekends looking after everyone else.
It is easy to ignore and overlook the people who don’t have that wow factor at 13 because we are not developing everyone else in any other environment. We don’t need to rely on one central talent pathway to support every athlete that shows some semblance of ‘talent’ - we need a community system where every local club is its own talent development environment.
Every kid deserves to learn, to feel like they are progressing, to receive feedback in a constructive and supportive way that genuinely helps their development. But to do this, we need a consistent message about what talent really is, what we want our cricketers to be capable of - the problems we want them to be able to solve and the moments we want them to stand up and perform in.
This dream world requires a better coach development and education system that is genuinely designed for the people who are there to pick up the pieces when dreams are shattered, when the team selection list is read out and your name isn’t on it, when you show up to training after work even when you don’t want to because you just love being around the other people at your club.
Thankfully, there is a discipline that is perfect for this leading role: skill acquisition. And we’re here, ready and waiting, to help you take the first steps in your journey forwards.