Loren Seagrave, coach to some of the world’s greatest sprinters, including Donovan Bailey, has a metaphor for developing talent.  He likens a talented young athlete to a bamboo plant.  Not like the ones in the rainforests, but the ones on your mantelpiece.  You’ve probably seen these bamboo plants around – in homeware shops and garden centres.  They are a single, scrawny, hollow twig in a 50ml shot glass. 

You can keep it and water it for months, years, and it will barely grow an inch.  But, if you persevere, and keep watering it every single day, eventually, it will shoot up, and become a magnificent plant almost in the blink of an eye.  To Seagrave, the growth of a talented athlete is akin to the growth of a bamboo plant.  It takes time, it takes patience and it takes commitment.  But the results are worth it.

But what is a ‘talented’ athlete?  Is talent a gift you are born with or a set of skills you have mastered?  Is talent physical or mental?  Can it be learned?  Can it be lost?

These are all questions that are open to debate.  But here’s a fact about talent:

Talent is not enough.  Andy Murray and Cristiano Ronaldo are both talented, of that there is no doubt, as are the rest of the ATP tennis stars and Premiership footballers.  But what is often forgotten is that it has taken a hell of a lot of work for these two individuals to get to where they are. 

Murray moved away from Scotland at 15 to live in Barcelona and train with the best in the world.  Ronaldo practised his ball skills with weights attached to his ankles for hours every day as a youngster.  Talent, in their case, was complemented by hard work and dedication.

So, in light of this, and feeling the need to get a few facts straight, In the Winning Zone put some questions on talent to the number one talent man in Scotland – Tony Stanger, Talent Manager at the Scottish Institute of Sport.

Stanger himself was a ‘talented’ individual.  He played 52 times on the wing for the Scotland rugby team, managing to finish as his country’s joint leading try scorer of all time, with 24 tries.  One of those tries was the winning touchdown in 1990 against England to win the grand slam in front of a packed Murrayfield.  It is arguably the most famous try in Scottish history.

Stanger knows that there are always ways in which talent can be ‘enhanced’.  For example, while he was still an international player, Stanger studied for a Sport Science degree.  He used this qualification along with his experience from rugby to become a successful professional coach in England before making the move back home.

So now his role is to find, develop and ultimately hoist talent onto the podium for Scotland on the world class stage.  No easy task in a country of five million people, not to mention the fact that Scotland has one of the worst health and obesity rates on the planet.  And don’t even start about the weather.  It isn’t unreasonable to say that ‘Scotland’ isn’t conducive to producing elite athletes.

So where does he start? 

“We are looking at talent from top to tail in Scotland,” says Stanger, speaking to us at the Institute’s base in Stirling. 

“Then we must work out if there are any gaps in the system. And seeing what we can do to make sure that athletes with potential are in the right sports and that they have the right support around them, so they come through to represent Scotland in the Commonwealth Games and Great Britain in the Olympics.”

By gaps in the system, Stanger means that he will search for new pathways which may lead more athletes into elite sport. 

“We will identify sports which we think have potential, and then we will work out a way of looking for new talent in that sport. I think every sport just now will have a fairly well established area where talent comes from, be that from schools, clubs or national age-grades.  But we will see what we can do to enhance that; can we find people from elsewhere that would be interested?

“However the strategy is fairly loose,” he adds.  “One size won’t fit all in this approach.”

In some ways, Stanger and his team at the Institute will almost act like a third party consultancy for all of Scotland’s sports, whilst ensuring they don’t step on anyone’s toes or undermine current structures. 

 If he is successful, these sports will benefit from having a wider range of athletes to choose from than they previously might have.

“The Institute talent programme has to add value to other sports, and if it doesn’t then it isn’t worth doing. Some sports might be supremely well fitted out with their talent strategy already, with lots of raw materials coming out, but they are not the sports that we would choose to work with.”

One such initiative Stanger has considered is to simply run ‘X-Factor’ style try-outs for athletes.  In partnership with UK Sport, for example, Steve Redgrave successfully piloted the ‘Sporting Giants’ campaign, where he called on tall, athletic men and women to effectively ‘audition’ for a place in London 2012 Olympic squads for rowing, volleyball and handball – all sports that require larger participants.

‘Girls for Gold’ was a similar programme in Manchester, aimed exclusively at females in a recruitment drive for cycling, pentathlon, sailing, rowing, canoeing and skeleton.

“These people have been given the opportunity to show what they can do.  It’s about catching some new talent, assessing them and establishing the athletes with most potential, then getting them into a sport they are suited to.”

And that’s what Stanger wants to ultimately achieve too.  “The easiest thing might be to get people to apply, as Girls for Gold and Sporting Giants proved, they had  a total of 5000 people apply.  There were a lot of Scots turning up for the testing in England.  It would have been nicer to have a testing centre up here, but there are some UK wide initiatives which will link quite closely to our own issues up here.

“So you are getting bums on seats, but what is crucial is what you do once you have the applicants.”

So what are his ideas? How do we intend to work with this talent in Scotland?  As Stanger himself says, we aren’t a country like China or the USA, where sheer power in numbers means the cream always rises to the top.

“It will be difficult to get the strategy together because I have been given a number of different topics which are all talent related, there are so many factors.”

However, talent ID, or talent capture as Stanger likes to call it, is only the beginning.  It brings back the old argument that talent only takes you so far.  Football has many examples: George Best, Paul Gascoigne and Scotland’s own Jim Baxter were three of the most talented footballers to have ever walked the planet.  But their talent wasn’t developed and groomed to its full potential, their lifestyles were wayward, and their careers were, ultimately, disappointing.

On the other hand, under the tutelage of a shrewd Scottish manager like Sir Alex Ferguson, young talents like Ryan Giggs, Roy Keane, David Beckham and Wayne Rooney have been given the right environment and sufficient opportunity to bloom and grow to their full worth.  They are four of the greatest footballers to come from the British Isles in the last fifteen years.  It’s no coincidence they were all at the same club under the same manager.  It’s back to the bamboo plant again.

“You can’t think about identifying talent without thinking about how you are going to develop it and how good the development process is,” warns Stanger.

“We are trying to take talent from somewhere that it is currently not, but is not just the matter of finding it.  It is what we do with it after that. Sport is very physically demanding, it’s not just about putting in a couple of hours a day.  It’s about going out there, hurting yourself in a session and then going out and doing it again.

“If you put people in the right environment, I believe that those behaviours can be moulded, drive and will to win.  If the environment isn’t right and there isn’t the right level of progression, then that’s a big issue.  That’s what we are looking at and we are not telling people that it will be easy at all.”

Stanger says that no stone must be left unturned in his quest to unearth and advance Scottish talent.  His mantra is exemplified by one man.  A man whose name will forever be synonymous with how a little talent can go a long, long way. 

“If you listen to Chris Hoy and talk to him, read what he’s about, you will realise that you will never get to where he is without a work ethic. People have to realise how hard it is and the sacrifices it is going to take to make it.  The talent is the easy part.  That’s why I think that Chris is a good role model because he has the drive and physical talent.”

If Tony Stanger can discover one or two more Chris Hoys, then it is safe to say he will have done his job well.

RO
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