Can we predict senior success based on junior results?
I saw that competitive success was used as the most influential criteria to determine the success of a future player. For me, that was a huge thing because it does not only influence the decision making of policy makers and investors it’s also influences the culture in tennis and how coaches are thinking. Leading to a result driven environment, and I think that’s not so good. I decided to quit my job and start to do research and to take a closer look on the role of junior results in senior success.
In tennis there are some studies show that the extent to which junior success relates to senior success differs by age
Briefly speaking, this means that the younger you are, the less important the results are. For example, research shows that results under the age of 14 has a poor correlation with success achieved as an adult. In my research we look more in detail. For example, we retrospectively and longitudinally examine how top 300 professional players from last 10 years have performed in ITF tournaments.
We compared the results by players peak ranking level.
We found that higher ranked players were more successful
The lower ranked a player was in the junior ranking, for example, in ITF grade A event that is the highest junior level competition, which includes Junior Grand Slam and Orange Bowl. The results showed that 60% of the top 10 players had won at least one title. While this is only 30% for players ranked between top 50 and top 100.
Interestingly, when it comes to players who are outside of top 100, there are only 10% of them that have achieved a Grade A title. So, this indicates that if you are more successful in junior level, the chance of achieving success at a senior level is higher. However, for me, I think it’s important also to look at those players who are ranked between top 50 and top 100. They are not necessarily successful when they were young and at junior level. That’s what the research are telling us about performance results when tennis players are young.
From What age does junior results become important in predicting senior success?
Results before age 14 has poor relationship with senior success. However, from 14 to 18, the results from top players can help us to understand to what extent professional players at different peak ranking level have performed. For example, our research showed that 45% of top 100 female players did not achieve their first ranking by the age of 16. This, for male players comes later. 55 % of top hundred male players did not achieve their first ranking by the age of 17. Furthermore, at the age of 18, 20 % of female players and 75 % of male players did not achieve a top 500 ranking. So, these are the evidence-based facts that may serve as a reference to guide the decision making for player development.
3 main learnings from PhD project
1) The development of the pathway to elite success is very different from players to player.
If we have 100 players, there might be one hundred different pathways towards success. So, the development of great players needs to be tailor made with multiple or alternative pathways.
2) If you are more successful in the junior level, the chances of being successful at a senior level is higher
However, we need to be aware that players who do not have success in juniors they may still have a chance to break into a higher senior ranking. This requires that we as a coaches or parents to pay attention on how we treat or how we react to the results of junior players, because I believe that the misbehavior of ourselves sometimes may kill the motivation of the players.
3) There are many factors that influence players future success.
The most important thing for coaches or parents is to help the players to understand themselves regarding who they are, how they are and who they want to be. To me, this means to keep challenging their ability to develop their competency and help to develop their individual weapons that are in line with their personality and in line with their game style.
The 60 % curve
We compared the ranking level at the age of 16-20 and to what extent we can predict future success. We use discriminant analysis as a tool to help us to predict the player’s ranking level in the future.
So, in the end, if you’re taking all the age information and their ranking information, we have around 60% of chance to correctly predict higher and lower ranked players.
For example, top 10 and all players outside of top 200. However, for players who are ranked in between top 20 and top 200, there is a lot of variation. You can really not predict them. That’s what we want to tell policy makers and coaches. That’s where we need to pay attention and not to overemphasize the tournament results in the juniors. We analyzed retrospective data all the top 10 players from last 10 years.
We find that 60 percent of these top 10 players can be predicted by their early rankings. That means, if a player achieves the ranking milestones before the average age of top 10 players, then he has 60% of chance of being a top 10 player.
Understanding the outliers
The players that are not successful in the juniors but achieved success in their senior career are interesting to me and we need to understand them and their stories and environmental context in which they were developed. We also need to understand the advantage and limitation of the numbers and statistic. The statistic results can tell us a general picture, the average and the perdition, while it does not tell you why some successful junior players dropped out and some players that are not successful in juniors but end up having a great senior career.
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