Perceptions of the importance of training, experience, and athletic talent for achievement in sports

The contribution of innate talents to the achievement of expert performance in sports has been questioned in recent years (Starkes Helsen, 1998; Helsen, Hodges, Van Winckel, Starkes, 2000; Starkes, 2000. In particular, the theory of deliberate practice contends that domain-specific deliberate practice can account for differing achievement (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer, 1993; Hodges Starkes, 1996; Ericsson, 1998; Helsen, Starkes, Hodges, 1998; Hodge & Deakin, 1998) and that practice is a more effective determinant of expert performance than is innate talent. The present goal was to investigate how college athletes perceive the contributions of training, experience and athletic talent to athletic achievement. It was hypothesized that athletes would attribute greater amounts of both training and experience, and talent to more accomplished athletes than to less accomplished athletes. Ninety-seven NCAA Division I athletes rated training, experience, and athletic talent on a two-dimensional grid for four types of athletes in their sport: (a) self, (b) athletes who are generally more successful than self, (c) athletes who are generally less successful than self, and (d) elite athletes. Elite athletes were defined as professional or Olympic caliber athletes. The ratings were anchored by 0: no training/experience/talent and 10: elite training/experience/talent. The ratings, subjected to a two-way (attribute by type) analysis of variance, yielded a significant attribute by type interaction (Wilks A = .96, F-3,F-184= 2.67, p=.05). Fig. 1 shows mean training and experience ratings by mean athletic talent ratings (with SEM bars). The belief that talent plays an important role in athletics is commonly held by college coaches (Hyllegard, Radlo, & Early, 2001), so it is not surprising that athletes would have similar views. However, attributing expert athletic performance largely to talent does not recognize the time and effort highly skilled individuals invest to achieve consistent and reproducible skilled performance (Ericsson, 2001, 2002). As Chambliss (1988) contended, attributing achievement to talent avoids the search for more informative accounts about conditions under which expert performance is achieved.