Playground to podium

The Playground to Podium initiative is our National Talent Identification Programme delivered by scottishathletics in partnership with the Scottish Government and sportscotland.

scottishathletics is holding a Talent ID day in June, with all of the 376 secondary schools in Scotland invited to send along three male and three female pupils from S3 to S6 who are not currently involved in an athletics club to the Talent ID day in their region.

The benefits for participants

All athletes taking part in the talent identification days are supported into athletics if they so wish and those athletes who are identified as having the potential to become World Class are invited to work with an experienced coach who will be able to facilitate their development towards podium potential. Identified athletes will also be part of National Talent ID Gatherings.

This national programme for athletics was developed through the INSPIRE 2014 programme. Our aim is to create and deliver an innovative and exciting programme in order to identify and develop pupils with potential to be future International athletes who are not currently involved in athletics club structures.

Ultimately the aim of the programme is to motivate and inspire these young Scots to make the most of their abilities in order to become Scotland’s next generation of Commonwealth and Olympic Champions.

The talent identification programme will primarily focus on power events and we  are looking to replicate the success of the work performed by the UK Talent Team – which has worked in partnership with 20 Olympic and Paralympic sports and over 100 World Class coaches; run 12 National athlete recruitment campaigns, and assessed over 7000 athletes.

These projects have resulted in over 100 newly identified athletes entering the World Class system across 17 sports with over 450 international appearances made and over 150 international medals won. Several of these athletes were selected to represent Great Britain at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games and 2014 Nanjing Youth Olympic Games.

Resources

The booklet you can download below provides more information on the 2015 camps, as well as the tests that athletes will undertake; teachers should feel free to use the tests as a guide to which athletes to send to the talent identification days.

For more information please view this video, download the documents below, or contact us at TalentID@scottishathletics.org.uk

p2podium 2015-desktop from Jon Eliot on Vimeo.

Downloads

• P2P 2015 Entry Form
• Playground to Podium Letter for Schools 2015
• Playground to Podium brochure