University of Bath develops new way to scout talent, reduce sports-related injuries
THE SPORTS SCIENTISTS at the University of Bath, one of the UK’s leading sports institutions have developed a revolutionary approach to help sports teams spot hidden talent and reduce injuries. The ‘biobanding’ approach will help in screening and grouping young players based on their physical or biological maturity and not their age. This will help them to develop new competition and training formats for an array of sports, from football (soccer) to cricket, and even gymnastics, a media release said.
Differences in maturity can be as much as six years which means that two 10-year-olds can look very different in size and shape. Whilst some will mature early, growing bigger and getting quicker as a result, others stay smaller for much longer. Sports like soccer and cricket typically favour bigger, early developers at the expense of smaller, later-developing, children.
With the help of biobanding, competition and training teams can include children of mixed ages yet similar maturity. In practice, this implies that some older, late-developing players ‘play down’ with younger peers, while younger yet early-developing athletes have the chance to ‘play up’ with older yet physically matched peers, the release said.
This approach presents the learning athletes with new challenges and learning opportunities and helps coaches to identify hidden stars. Studies also suggest the fact that players enjoy it too. For later developers, biobanding gives them more of an opportunity to shine and take on leadership roles; for early developers, it provides greater challenges and encourages them to develop and rely upon their technical and tactical skills.
Recent research on the effects of biobanding in football also demonstrates that by training players in accordance with their stages of maturity, common injuries that occur during the teenage growth spurt can be prevented.
Around the world, there is growing interest in this approach. Prof Sean Cumming is already working with teams across Europe, North America, and UK. According to him: “Biobanding provides a real opportunity for clubs to diversify how training sessions are organized and delivered. There’s a fantastic potential through grouping players differently to spot hidden talent lurking in academies, but also and importantly to significantly reduce injuries.”
He further adds that “We would love to work with more sports teams in India to showcase how biobanding can be effective and to help them develop tools, techniques, and protocols to apply our research in practice. Already in the UK, our research with cricket teams shows this to be highly effective; we believe the results would be equally impressive in India.”
The publicly available "biobanding" application will also allow parents and coaches to determine how much more growing their children have left and how tall they are predicted to grow, the media release added.
