Talent Identification & Skill Development

We’re happy to have Joe Baker back on the show. Joe is a sport scientist at York University in Toronto, Canada. He has a PhD and specializes in human skill acquisition, and talent identification and development.

We go around the houses several times in this interview, talking about nature versus nurture, whether or not there is such a thing as a sports gene, the famous 10,000 hours hypothesis of skill development, Canadian hockey, American basketball, you name it.

Among Joe’s most recent publications, he co-edited the book Developing Sport Expertise: Researchers and Coaches Put Theory into Practice, which is available on Amazon. And co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Sport Expertise coming out in April 2015.

Sports Coach Radio is a series of weekly in-depth interviews with world-class sports leaders, coaches and sports scientists. It’s hosted by Glenn Whitney, a coaching adviser and leadership consultant. Follow us on Twitter, where we post coaching tips and links to interesting articles just about every day of the week. The handle is @sportscoachtalk. And we’d be grateful if you’d leave a short review of the show on the Apple iTunes page.

Topics: The sports gene, talent identification, skill acquisition, skill development, genetics in sports, Joe Baker, Daniel Coyle, Malcolm Gladwell, David Epstein, Pete Carroll, Seattle Seahawks, New England Patriots, Bill Bellicheck, talent ID