Reel Smart Academic Roundtable: The Coaches’ Eye

La Trobe University and AIDC present the Reel Smart Academic Roundtables which sees academics from La Trobe University pitch up-to-the-minute original research to producers at AIDC with the aim of triggering the development of new factual series or one-off documentary projects.

We know that Australia has great sporting talent, but how do coaches identify this talent in the years before an athlete reaches their peak performance levels? If you ask them, they talk about having an ‘eye for talent’ – the ability to spot an athlete’s potential before they start winning at high levels. In this documentary, we will follow several coaches from Australia’s combat sports as they attempt to predict who will be the next Olympic champions in boxing, judo and taekwondo. We will see the coaches working with the athletes, testing them in sport science facilities, and discussing them with each other as they try to determine what attributes point to future success. By the end, we will see the athletes vie for their place on the Australian Olympic squad and, ultimately, their spot on the podium. This will tell us whether the coaches’ predictions, made up to 12 years before the Olympics, were correct – are they just guessing, or do they really have ‘an eye for talent’?

The Reel Smart Academic Roundtables are limited in capacity. Interested delegates are encouraged to reserve their spot via AIDC’s online event platform early to avoid disappointment.

Image Credit: Archivist Media