Talent in young archers in Sleman: Prasetyo 2018 study

Forty children aged 7 to 12 who train at three archery clubs in the Sleman district, near Yogyakarta, were put through the Indonesian national protocol for talent identification. The tests come in three kinds: body measurements (height, weight, arm span), physical tests (a side-support hold, the wall sit, flexibility and a breath hold) and a shooting test of six ends at 15 metres.

Adding up the results, the authors place 5 children (12.5%) among the "very talented", 24 (60%) among the "talented" and 11 (27.5%) among the "sufficiently talented". The three categories used cover the whole sample: no child falls below the lowest one, and there is no category for a child who shows no aptitude.

That is the whole result. The paper reports no scores: not the body measurements, not the physical test results, not the points scored over the six ends, not the thresholds that separate one category from the next. The longest part of the text is a review of what talent identification is and why it pays to start young, while the data gathered on those forty children occupy three lines.

The design is a descriptive survey with tests and measurements. The stated population is every child aged 7 to 12 in the Sleman district who attends an archery club; the sample is 40, selected on the criterion of being in active training. The three clubs are Kids Archery Club, Selabora Panahan at the sport science faculty of Yogyakarta State University, and Sendangadi Archery Club.

The tests, and the way they are added together, come from a 2013 guide issued by the Indonesian ministerial directorate for special education, cited in the bibliography but not reproduced: the paper lists the names of the tests and says the aptitude score is the accumulation of all the measurements, without explaining how tests expressed in centimetres, in seconds and in points are weighted against one another. The analysis is a tabulation of percentages, with no statistical test at all.

Nothing is left of the practical detail: there is no record of when the measurements were taken, with what equipment, by whom, what bow and draw weight the children used for the six ends at 15 metres, or what target face they were shooting at.

The limit that weighs most is that the data are not there. Without scores and without the thresholds for the three categories, the percentages of 12.5, 60 and 27.5% cannot be checked, reproduced or compared with other groups of children: they are the output of a calculation the paper does not show. And since the available categories start at "sufficiently talented", the finding that all forty children come out talented to some degree depends on how the scale is built, not on what the children did.

This is a cross-sectional study covering an afternoon of measurements, so it says nothing about what followed: none of those children was tracked over time to see whether the category assigned bore any relation to the archer they became. The sample is forty children from a single district. Some of the tests are never justified for archery: the breath hold in particular enters the battery with no explanation of what it is supposed to predict.

The text is in Indonesian with an English abstract, and it shows signs of light editing: the shooting distances for the pre-junior age group are given as "10, 15 and 20 cm" where metres are meant.

For an archer this study has no bearing: it does not measure performance, does not test any training, and never links any of its tests to a score. In the registry it counts as a document on a junior selection protocol and how it is applied in clubs, not as evidence about what makes an archer accurate.

One observation remains useful to anyone working with children. A battery of tests that hands everyone a positive label is not selecting; it is describing. It serves to say that those forty children fall inside a range considered normal for their age, not to identify which of them will go far, and the paper gives no evidence that a label assigned at seven says anything about the archer at twenty.