Coaches are faced with the difficult task of identifying and selecting athletes to their team. Despite its widespread practice in sport, there is still much to learn about improving the identification and selection process. Evidence to date suggests selection decisions (at different competitive levels) can be inaccurate, bias driven, and sometimes even illogical. These mistakes are believed to contribute to “talent wastage,” the effect of a coach’s wrongful selection and/or deselection of an athlete to/from a team. Errors of this scale can lead to negative repercussions for all stakeholders involved and therefore deserve further exploration. It is the purpose of this paper to shed light on the potential factors influencing talent wastage and to illuminate possible psychological pitfalls when making decisions under uncertainty.

This perspective focuses on the need for researchers and practitioners to carefully consider the clarity and consistency of their language in the context of athlete development. Evidence supporting a lack of congruency in the way certain terms and expressions are defined, understood, and operationalized continues to accumulate, highlighting the importance of this area for sport stakeholders and the potential looming crises. In systems that regularly rely on precision and accuracy, it will be critical that all involved in the co-creation of knowledge generation and application carefully consider terms that may further complicate athlete development practices. We highlight some potentially blurry terms and draw attention to potential avenues for future research.

The aim of this study is to investigate the differences between select on-ice measures using inertial movement sensors based on match outcome, and to determine changes in player movements across three periods of play. Data were collected during one season of competition in elite female ice hockey players (N = 20). Two-factor mixed effects ANOVAs for each skating position were performed to investigate the differences in match outcome, as well as differences in external load measures during the course of a match. For match outcome, there was a small difference for forwards in explosive ratio (p = 0.02, ES = 0.26) and percentage high force strides (p = 0.04, ES = 0.50). When viewed across three periods of a match, moderate differences were found in skating load (p = 0.01, ES = 0.75), explosive efforts (p = 0.04, ES = 0.63), and explosive ratio (p = 0.002, ES = 0.87) for forwards, and in PlayerLoad (p = 0.01, ES = 0.70), explosive efforts (p = 0.04, ES = 0.63), and explosive ratio (p = 0.01, ES = 0.70) for defense. When examining the relevance to match outcome, external load measures associated with intensity appear to be an important factor among forwards. These results may be helpful for coaches and sport scientists when making decisions pertaining to training and competition strategies.

A clearer understanding of, and tighter boundaries between, terms are important for researchers designing studies as well as for other sport stakeholders creating evidence-informed policies. This article considers the terms ‘athlete’, ‘talent’, and ‘player’ from psychological and sociocultural perspectives and in different sporting communities to highlight the importance of terminological clarity in sport research. We present considerations to clarify the use of these terms within different contexts and how the use of specific terms may affect knowledge mobilization in diverse sporting populations. A conceptual discussion is provided to help operationalize development-related terminology and its associated stages, to better reflect contemporary academic thought, and enhance practical interpretations. Importantly, we also call for greater transparency from researchers when presenting findings and encourage practitioners to clearly define key terms when working in sport. Our intention in this paper is to energize readers to consider how we use language in athlete identification and development contexts, to stimulate deeper thought and discourse around the possible implications these terms may have at any point of an individual’s development in sport. Greater deliberation, identification, and acknowledgment of the drawbacks accompanying these terms will be needed before more confident assertions can be made on how researchers and practitioners could (or even should) implement certain terminology across youth sport contexts moving forward. This paper adds to a growing literature on the importance of clarity in terminology and acts as an impetus for those working in specific sports to co-design key terms used by researchers, practitioners, and policy makers.