Australian Rules: Succession planning

Sport is big business in this day and age, and administrators looking to the long-term health of their sports must start with a focus on the youth. Children's sport is both a training ground and a battle ground: important for developing young talent and for ensuring that future champs don't disappear to join a rival code or sport.

In large part, the competition for young hearts and minds is really a numbers game. The Australian Government injects funds into the booming junior football business as do corporate sponsors, all to bring in the mini multitudes. The Australian Football League runs the Auskick program, a watered-down version of the game designed to allay the fears of anxious parents, and aims to bring the littlies into the fold from the tender age of five. Aside from a football coaching program, Auskick participants receive a backpack full of footy goodies, which keeps them happy for the season. The program clearly focuses on skill development, with weekly coaching and competition.

Then on into adolesence, the game for talent spotting and retention hots up. Talent scouts abound at local junior fixtures, seeking out promising youngsters for long-term elite programs and academies. From the masses of minor footballers, champions between the ages of 15 to 18 years of age are given opportunities to attend draft camps, from which they may go on to be selected in the national draft and find themselves in an Australian Football League (AFL) club. And naturally, the AFL doesn't want any potential crowd-pullers to slip through their net. So what factors can be used to predict whether or not a talented young buck has the right stuff to make it in the big league?

Draft camps provide recruiters the opportunity to run a battery of tests on elite juniors. Most of these examine physical fitness, but a new brace of psychological tests were introduced this year. These tests profile a player's ability to manage stressful situations, look at their emotional intelligence and examine their personal strength.

While no one is yet saying how the psychological profiling of junior footballers will impact upon AFL selections, studies have clearly indicated that physical characteristics can provide an idea of whether or not a player is likely to be selected. For instance, a study completed by Griffith University showed that selected players were significantly taller and stronger than non-selected players, and possessed similar levels of flexibility and aerobic fitness as senior elite and sub-elite players.

All in all, the future of Australian Rules depends greatly on the strength of junior competitions and players and the code's ability to keep talent within its ranks. No expense is spared, and support is enlisted from government, the corporate sector and from science, all to get that young dreamer from the backyard into the centre of the Melbourne Cricket Ground ten years down the track, oh, and naturally, the money the punters pay to watch him ringing in the tills.