Discriminating talent-identified junior Australian football players using a video decision-making task

This study examined if a video decision-making task could discriminate talent-identified junior Australian football players from their non-talent-identified counterparts. Participants were recruited from the 2013 under 18 (U18) West Australian Football League competition and classified into two groups: talent-identified (State U18 Academy representatives; n=25; 17.8 +/- 0.5 years) and non-talent-identified (non-State U18 Academy selection; n=25; 17.3 +/- 0.6 years). Participants completed a video decision-making task consisting of 26 clips sourced from the Australian Football League game-day footage, recording responses on a sheet provided. A score of 1 was given for correct and 0 for incorrect responses, with the participants total score used as the criterion value. One-way analysis of variance tested the main effect of status on the task criterion, whilst a bootstrapped receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve assessed the discriminant ability of the task. An area under the curve (AUC) of 1 (100%) represented perfect discrimination. Between-group differences were evident (P<0.05) and the ROC curve was maximised with a score of 15.5/26 (60%) (AUC=89.0%), correctly classifying 92% and 76% of the talent-identified and non-talent-identified participants, respectively. Future research should investigate the mechanisms leading to the superior decision-making observed in the talent-identified group.