Ryan Toal
Director of Sport · EasyPE
Most elite athletes were never spotted as juniors. Most junior stars never make it as seniors. The systems built to find talent miss most of it — and school PE is among the leakiest of all. Here's the research, and what we can do about it.
Every child deserves to have their talent recognised.
A 2023 study in Springer Sports Medicine tracked 38,383 junior athletes. 89.2% of athletes who reached international level at U17 or U18 never went on to reach senior international level. The inverse is also true — 82% of elite senior athletes were never identified or selected at junior level. The systems designed to find talent are missing most of it.
The mechanism that explains much of this is called the Relative Age Effect (RAE). Children born just after the annual selection cut-off date are up to three times less likely to be identified as talented than those born just before it. Not because they are less talented — but because they are physically younger and less developed at the exact moment of comparison. A 2025 Portuguese study of U14 national team selections found that 92.9% of selected players were born in Q1 or Q2 of the year. The older half of the cohort.
A 2026 Australian study of 10,134 adolescents found that talent identification in school settings was 47–70% less efficient than structured selection environments. The implication is direct: school sports days and PE lessons — the places where most children get their only exposure to competitive athletics — are among the least reliable environments for spotting who is actually good.
Athletics is, in many ways, the most honest sport when it comes to measurement. A time, a distance, a height. No subjective coaching eye, no team selection politics. A U15 girl runs 12.4 seconds. That number means something specific — and it means the same thing regardless of which school she attends, which county she lives in, or whether a talent scout happened to be watching.
That's why the Sports Day Manager and the Athletics Data Tracker were built with this in mind. Both apps come pre-loaded with ESAA (English Schools Athletics Association) 2026 benchmark data, so every performance a student logs is automatically graded against real national standards — District, County, Entry, and National levels. A student who has never been to a county championship can still see, in real time, exactly where their performance sits in the national picture. Teachers can filter, track, and export that data. Personal bests are recorded and charted over time.
The tools also come with built-in NGB talent pathway contacts — England Athletics, Athletics Australia, USATF, and World Athletics — so when a teacher or parent sees a number worth flagging, they know exactly where to go next. No Google searching required.
Athletics Data Tracker does exactly this — dual grading against multiple national systems, with ESAA benchmarks built in.
See the Athletics Data Tracker →Both apps are pre-loaded with direct links to the following talent identification programmes. These are the front doors for getting a young athlete noticed at the right level.
Most teachers don't have time to manually cross-reference performances against national benchmarks after a sports day. That's not a criticism — it's just reality. When you've packed up the equipment, sorted the results, and emailed the house points, it's gone.
What the data tools change is that the grading is automatic. A student runs a time. The app flags it as Entry Standard. The teacher sees it. Maybe they mention it. Maybe the student follows up. Maybe nothing comes of it. But at least the information was there, visible, accurate — rather than filed away on a clipboard and forgotten.
That's not a guarantee that talent will be found. But it's better than the alternative. And given what the research says about how much talent is currently being missed, better is worth building.
Data doesn't replace the coach's eye. But it does work when the coach isn't there — and for a lot of students, that's most of the time.
Ryan Toal — Director of Sport
Full-time PE teacher and Director of Sport. BISAL Conference Co-Chair. Building AI-powered tools for educators in between lessons, fixtures, and parent-teacher evenings. All views are honest. All tools are tested in real classes.