Youth sport specialisation: the need for an evidence-based definition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sport specialisation, conceptually understood to involve mono-training and repetition for the purpose of skill acquisition and athlete development for a single sport, is increasingly common in youth sports. However, it has not always been this way. Over the past 30 years, research on expertise and skill acquisition has profoundly influenced the focus and structure of youth sport programme. Particularly, Ericsson, Kramp and Tesch-Romer’s (1993) work in music renewed research interests related to the importance of deliberate practice in the development of expertise.1 Some studies in sport, using retrospective questionnaires, suggested that high volume of intense, sport-specific practice at a young age is necessary to attain expertise in one sport.2 This body of research has promoted the idea that a large quantity of intense sport-specific practice and early specialisation is a logical pathway towards adult elite sport performance, and has contributed to the popularity of youth sport specialisation. Simultaneously, biographical studies of elite level athletes suggested that their childhood sport experiences involved sport-specific practice, and play activities and engagement in various sports. In contrast with the early specialisation approach, Cote (1999) defined sampling as an early sport participation environment characterised by diversity, both within (eg, play, practice) and between sports.3 Considering both distinctive lines of research led to equivocal results, Cote, Ericsson and Law (2005) …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.028 | 0.111 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.020 | 0.030 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".