The Role of Skill Acquisition Specialists Within Sports—Why Every High-performance Sports Organization Needs These Experts!
Fabian Otte 1, Tyler Yearby 2, and Shawn Myszka 2
Across high-performance sports, a growing number of specialized expert practitioners within team staffs is becoming the norm, and the emergence of “skill acquisition specialists” (SAS) has been noted over recent years. While these SAS aim to support teams and coaches in designing and facilitating effective practice and performance environments for individual athletes, there are additional opportunities that would positively affect high-performance sports organizations and build bridges between departments. Hence, by elaborating on the role of SAS with the potential benefits, responsibilities, collaboration opportunities, and a formal job description, this position paper aims to merge contemporary theory based on an ecological dynamics rationale with a “pracademic” perspective on athlete development and performance preparation. We make several arguments for why every high-performance sports organization needs SAS support and aim for key decision-makers in sports to understand the benefits of SAS. Constantly highlighting an athlete-environment-centered perspective on coaching, several concepts such as constraints, representative learning design, affordances, alive movement problems, and dexterity are brought to life by expanding on the SAS role in detail and providing examples for practical application of the role in high-performance sport coaching.
