PhD Thesis
University of Canberra
Dr Alexandra Lascu
Canberra
Australia
Year
2021
As the profile of women in sport continues to grow and the Australian Women’s Cricket Team players become household names, the lack of representation by female athletes in research needed to be addressed. Through a detailed literature review from a holistic perspective, we have provided a foundation of knowledge for talent development in cricket using ecological dynamics as a contemporary approach to human movement and skill acquisition. The experiential knowledge of elite female cricketers and coaches was captured in two qualitative studies to ground the knowledge and theories of talent development with key stakeholder experiences. The initial investigation of perceptions and practices of talent development in cricket outlined an inherent reliance on talent identification, a linear pathway experience for players, a rise in professionalism, and misaligned coaching practices for skill development. To address these key issues, a grounded theory approach to professionalism was taken and the roles of athletes and organisations in promoting women’s sport were explored. Two field-based experiments were then conducted centring on skill development approaches at the foundation level of the talent development pathway. Based on an informed framework of skill acquisition and representative task design, it appears that skill development at the amateur level could be improved to provide greater talent development opportunities for more female cricketers. A controlled trial intervention indicated that representative learning design is appropriate for skill development with amateur female cricketers, with improved skills in a majority of bowlers and batters. To support the ongoing growth of cricket for women, opportunities to compete and develop talent should occur beyond the talent development pathway in local cricketing communities by improving coaching practices and allowing players to develop at their unique rate. Key outputs from this thesis include a task design tool developed for coaches to support their approaches to skill and talent development, a grounded theory of professionalism for women in sport and a guide to creating holistic talent development programs.
Talent Development
ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS APPROACH
While a talent pathway currently exists, its effectiveness has been called into question after coaches and athletes were unable to identify the aim of such programs.
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Skill and talent have been traditionally viewed as linear processes, but when an ecological dynamics approach is applied, they, like the human experience, are seen as nonlinear, ever-changing and ongoing processes that should be supported within and beyond talent pathways.
Representative Learning Design
SKILL ACQUISITION PERSPECTIVE
Training for skill development at the community level has been shown to be ineffective from a skill acquisition perspective. Using representative learning design to underpin a training intervention, we found that small changes to the task and the environmental constraints can improve the achievement of goal-directed behaviours by up to 49% in amateur female cricketers.
