The importance of relevant criteria of selection in ensuring the success of the national selection systems in athletics: A review

Abstract

Scientific selection represents one of the most important concerns of contemporary sports, as evidenced by the major world investments made in order to identify unique combinations of physical and mental potential and abilities that can be developed towards human biological limits. Some countries have developed complex systems and programs aimed at identifying and especially transforming sports potential into performance, emphasizing the need to develop potentially talented performers and not just to early identify them. The critical analysis of the Romanian selection system in athletics highlights the shortcomings and allows corrections to be outlined. Athletics in particular is a complex sports discipline that requires a multitude of psychomotor and coordinative skills such as rhythm, tempo, balance, segmental coordination, space orientation, and laterality, skills recommended to be detected from the initial phase of the selection in order to foresee the motor endowment of the child and to guide him accordingly. The purpose of this review was to examine the discrepancies between the Romanian selection system in athletics and other successful national systems in order to emphasize the necessity of new perspectives regarding the selection criteria, which need to be relevant in detecting skills in the area of psychomotricity and coordination.