JUSTIN LANGER: Parents should Replace gut-feelings with data to find young sporting talent

Talent doesn’t always announce itself loudly. Sometimes it whispers waiting for the right tools and opportunities.

Moneyball was a revolutionary approach in baseball in 2002 where Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane used data and advanced statistics to identify undervalued players.

By focusing on objective metrics rather than traditional scouting biases, Beane built a competitive, cost-effective team, in an environment where his club simply couldn’t compete in the big money industry of Major League Baseball.

Through his process, Beane challenged conventional wisdom and reshaped talent valuation in global sports.

In 2003, Michael Lewis wrote the book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, before Brad Pitt brought the philosophy into the mainstream playing Beane in the 2011 Hollywood film.

As a player, coach and parent I often question talent identification and if there is a better way of doing it. I also wonder how many kids are missing out on opportunities because of geography, schooling or physical attributes.

When I was growing up, I played footy for Warwick Black. We won six consecutive premierships and were unbeatable. My teammates were highly skilled and, on the surface, destined for higher honours.

How many of them played AFL footy, or were drafted?

Zero.

In my cricket career, I represented WA in under-16s, 17s, 19s and 23s.

Interestingly, only one of the highly talented players I played with in all those years, went on to play senior cricket for WA or Australia — Test star Damien Martyn.

Across Australia’s sprawling sporting landscape, where raw ability often lies hidden in suburban backyards, remote communities, and schoolyards, far from elite pathways, the search for potential is important, for organisations and individuals.

Talent identification has long been the heartbeat of sporting success, yet for decades it has relied on a mixture of intuition, luck, birth dates and subjective judgement.

This week, I visited the Gold Netball Centre in Jolimont, to watch a session run by SportsKey, an Australian program reframing how talent is found, measured, and nurtured.

Initiated as part of a broader WA Football talent project, I watched boys and girls from multicultural, Indigenous and lower socio-economic backgrounds, having their natural talents being tested.

The initiative, led by former AFL great Peter Bell, is employing SportsKey to search for, and identify, “hidden gems”, kids who may lack speed or power but possess untapped athletic potential and skill. Kids who shouldn’t be left behind.

It is well documented that traditional systems include entrenched biases like the Relative Age Effect, which historically favours early born, physically mature players while overlooking late-bloomers.

Speaking to Peter Bell and WA Football commissioner Dixie Marshall, it is clear they want to broaden the net of opportunity for WA kids.

“There are children that are slipping through the cracks. So, we are actively searching for them and finding them. Opportunity can’t just be for the rich kids,” Marshall says.

“As a consequence of this pilot, gifted children have been successfully identified outside the traditional AFL pathway by proactively recruiting active, sports loving, and competitive kids from public schools, irrespective of their sporting background. This approach has found talent likely to have been overlooked by traditional methods.”

“For example, 100 per cent of boys in WA’s State 16s program were born in the first half of the year. That is not a crazy anomaly, it is a clear bias towards the early maturers. What about all those talented children born July to December? They have all been overlooked. We need to deliver fairness to all WA boys and girls.”

Where traditional systems tend to prioritise early bloomers, the tallest, fastest, strongest teenagers, I saw in SportsKey a more holistic, longitudinal approach. Their methodology embraces a philosophy that potential is not fixed but rather a trajectory.

By valuing future potential over today’s scoreboard, SportsKey gives overlooked and late-maturing athletes a genuine chance to be seen and found.

“Through the program, young athletes are assessed not just on pure performance outcomes but on the deeper qualities that predict long-term success,” SportsKey managing director Chris Smith says.

“Measured traits like cognitive speed, decision-making under fatigue, coordination, movement efficiency, visual processing, relative age effect, biological maturation, and projected growth.”

This came out in watching kids being measured in how they threw a ball, caught balls, moved, reacted, anticipated, made decisions. It was really cool to watch.

Smith went on to say: “We live in a world where structured, formal systems are provided to the best and biggest kids in certain age groups. But what I have found is that the kids who get the most informal play, away from the planned structured programs, are often the ones who develop the greatest skill sets.

“These are often learned in the backyard, at the beach, riding to school, and at the parks with their mates. The lack of informal play is robbing our kids and yet those who live in regional areas are often the ones who still get to enjoy these, more than a lot of city kids.”

He wrote: “Youth sports are currently out of control. I was the ninth overall pick in the MLB Draft. I played professionally for more than 10 years. Here is how I am navigating youth sports as a parent to four kids:

“First, amateur sports created many of my best sports memories (above pro sports). Yet today’s landscape has gotten out of control. So, what I am doing to help my kids maximise their time in sports:

• Play multiple sports. No, I am not doing this because some guru says it increases their athleticism, or a study said kids that play college/pro do. I am doing this because I want them to have unique experiences. Team sports, solo endeavours, wins, losses, strategy, etc.
• Gauge interest. We are not doing 6am lessons or endless skills camps over the summer. If they show interest, we support them by buying a few tools we can use at home with them. The kids who succeed long-term in sports have an insane natural curiosity.
• Praise the effort. We don’t do participation trophies in our house (sorry). I want my kids to feel failure and to see success. Yet what I focus on is their effort (and lessons), it is the only thing I talk about after a sporting event.
• Ignore the propaganda machine. Trust me, there are plenty of people, leagues, and organizations that will take your money and promise hope. “Your son/daughter will play at the next level if they work with us.” Trust me if they are that good, you will know (and rarely pay).
• Focus on the known. My kids have a .000001 per cent chance of playing pro sports. Yet done right they have a 100 opportunity of learning lessons, building relationships, and gaining confidence. It is the ultimate teacher. They play for that reason.

“You are not crazy for having a ‘normal summer’ or not putting your kids in specialized lessons at six years old. If your kid has the God-given ability to play professional sports, trust me you will see it.”

Both Smith and Turner make good points, and I couldn’t have put it better than either of them.

In many respects, the emergence of programs such as SportsKey in Australia echoes the quiet rebellion that defined the Moneyball revolution. Where Beane used spreadsheets and sabermetrics to challenge baseball’s old guard, SportsKey uses biomechanics, cognitive mapping and growth modelling to question long-held assumptions about what a future star “should” look like.

And, like Moneyball, the genius of the system lies in challenging to complacency by providing objective evidence to subjective gut feelings and in getting us thinking.

It forces coaches, scouts, and administrators to rethink what they value, why they value it, and whether the metrics that matter most are the ones we’ve spent decades ignoring. In doing so, programs like SportsKey don’t replace the art of talent identification but rather enriches it.

As a coach, data provides the intuitive eye with a clearer canvas to paint on. The curious coach or recruiter revels in this.

For a parent, with a biased eye for their child, data offers an insight into their potential, or also an opportunity to provide choices for where their kid’s best skill sets may thrive.

What’s important though, is to recognize that backyard or beach sports, riding your bike, jumping on a boogie board or surfboard, playing totem tennis (standard Christmas present in our house), or table tennis in the garage, often provide the best grounding to develop all round skills. And should never be underestimated.

The data proves it.