The Impacts of Transport Accessibility and Remoteness on Elite Sports Talent Development

The Impacts of Transport Accessibility and Remoteness on Elite Sports Talent Development

How does transport availability and access to training, coaching and competition influence the propensity for towns and regions to produce elite sports athletes? This paper provides the first multivariate spatial analysis exploring the influence of transport accessibility and remoteness from major centres, where higher-order junior coaching and competition is available, on the propensity of towns and regions to produce elite professional sports players. Our approach is to geo-code the place of junior development for a large population of elite athletes, match it with socio-demographic data for the populations in those areas, and with measures of transport accessibility and remoteness, to identify possible correlates. The authors develop a unique approach, the Talent Tracker, that identifies, tabulates and maps the junior town/region of origin for the 1,290 players who were drafted and played at least one game in the senior professional Australian Football League (AFL), Australia’s most popular football code by participation, in the period 1997-2010. Junior AFL participation data for the same period is used to determine spatial measures of each AFL region’s annual average ‘talent yield’ (elite players produced per junior participant). The results are matched with Accessibility/Remoteness Index of Australia (ARIA) data, which provides a measure of spatial accessibility via the road network to key centres and services, and with Australian Bureau of Statistics Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) data, aggregated to the level of AFL regions. Bi-variate and multivariate analyses are conducted using SPSS software. The bivariate results suggest that as transport accessibility decreases, talent yield also decreases (Pearson correlation statistic -0.242; p=0.02) but the relationship is weaker than first expected. Locations are identified that fit the trend, to provide further insight. Locations that deviate from the trend, over-producing talent are also identified. However, multivariate analysis highlights that if one controls for whether the region is predominantly AFL or rugby dominated (in Australia’s parochial sports landscape), and for socio-economic status, the influence of transport accessibility becomes significantly less strong. The hypothesis that transport accessibility and remoteness affects sports talent development for sports with wide national coverage in rural areas has minimal support. Many of the AFL regions with low transport accessibility scores but high talent yields have well designed coaching and competition structures, suggesting the organisation of sports landscapes may help overcome tyrannies of distance. Opportunities for further research include detailed examination of transport factors at the micro-scale within such locations, to assist sports administrators and to give greater opportunity to youth in more remote peri-urban and regional locations.

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