'SKILLS2FLAG’ project: Skill transfer within female and male athletes across different team Sports

This project focuses on accelerating the talent and skill transfer amongst young athletes from one team sport to another. Flag Football is an Olympic team sport that will require recruitment of 2 athletes from other team sports if they are to have a successful campaign at the Brisbane 2032 Olympics. With limited time, and the restrictions of a very big country as it is Australia, traditional talent identification processes are too slow and lengthy. Instead, this project proposes to investigate the best strategies to implement in order to transfer skills from one team sport to another.
An opportunity to circumvent the enormous investments made in attaining sport expertise exists through talent transfer. Talent transfer aims to recycle and fast-track high performing athletic talent through the detection of athletes with attributes likely to facilitate their transition and achieve similar or greater success in their recipient sport. Talent detection refers to the “discovery of potential
performers among those who are not currently involved in the sport in question” (Williams & Reilly, 2000, p. 658) and the process of capturing individuals who demonstrate the desired physical, physiological, psychological and skill attributes required to excel within that sport (Hoare & Warr, 2000). Despite the increased prevalence of talent transfer initiatives worldwide, there is little
empirical evidence to support its efficacy, and limited understanding of best practice and the underpinning mechanisms that facilitate transfer (MacNamara & Collins, 2015).
One factor that may play an important role in facilitating an athlete’s transfer from one sport to another is their decision-making and related perceptual-motor expertise. It is well established within the literature that expert decision-makers possess superior perceptual-motor skills such as pattern perception, anticipation, and visual search strategies (Panchuk, Klusemann, & Hadlow, 2018). It is less well known, however, the extent to which these perceptual qualities can transfer between sports or the mechanisms facilitating this transfer (Causer & Ford, 2014). The opportunity to bring together these two domains (i.e., talent transfer and the transfer of perceptual-motor expertise) provides a unique point of view for advancing the limited knowledge surrounding them, and more importantly, understanding the complex interactions which enable athletes to succeed at the elite level in more than one domain. The current program of research aims to address these limitations by exploring ways to enhance talent transfer, with an emphasis on perceptual-motor expertise development, within male and female athletes for Flag Football as they prepare for the 2028 Olympic Games.