A NOTED sports engineer employed with the Adelaide Football Club has found that by using a psychological questionnaire he can predict promise in talent identification, particularly in goal-scoring potential in Indigenous footballers.
Dr Andrew Walsh, a consultant with the Crows, has developed a mathematical model from the attentional and interpersonal style (TAIS) test used by the AFL on potential draftees which he says shows that the best performed players predicted by this model are mostly Indigenous.
"I built my model, which gave OK but not spectacular results, from the TAIS then looked at the top 10 and found most of them were Aboriginal," Walsh writes in an email interview from Qatar where he's based in the United Arab Emirates.
"What I found was that six of the top 10 players with goal-scoring potential predicted by the model were of Indigenous Australians, Tiwi or of Pacific Island descent," he said.
"In fact, the average Aboriginal draftee out-performs the average non-Indigenous draftee in all three measures investigated: games played, ball possession and goals scored."
A confidentiality clause prevents Walsh from identifying the players, although he gave a few cryptic clues.
"I would like to think that a couple who my model scored highly in 2007 have shown a few things," Walsh said. "One who scored second highest ever is having a cracker of a first year (the highest scorer was non-Indigenous and plays first 22 for the Bulldogs).
"Another Indigenous kid who also scored highly was recently upgraded from a certain rookie list, which I predicted at the beginning of the season."
Walsh, who in between time with the Crows work as a sports scientist at the Qatar Sports Medicine Hospital, presented his findings at the pre-Olympic Congress in Computer Science in Sport in Nanjing, China.
"TAIS marking give scores for 17 different parameters," he said. "My model just returns a single figure which represents the probability any player will score more than average number of goals, eg: One player scored 75 per cent last year (extremely high) and is smoking it up in his first year. The average mark is only about 35 per cent."
Walsh said although tests used in the AFL national draft include anthropometric (comparative measurements of the body), physiological, medical and psychological tests, the TAIS test is a useful stand-alone predictor of performance.
DARREN MONCRIEFF
AboriginalFootball@westnet.com.au
Tuesday, August 26 2008
Last Modified on 26/08/2008 12:51