Talent orientation: the impact of motor abilities on future success in table tennis

In talent screening campaigns of primary school children, the aim is to identify talents and assign the children to a sport suitable to their characteristics. Here, the question arises whether these tests can help find talents at the elementary school age. Therefore, this study on table tennis players examined whether second-grade children tested with a battery of nine motor tests (Fulda Movement Check) were able to reach the predicted performance level in later adolescence. For this prognostic validity study, N = 225 U9 table tennis players were tested with two anthropometric and nine general motor tests between 2010 and 2014. These characteristics were then related to the success that table tennis players achieved by 2017. The comparison of table tennis players with soccer players, athletes of other sports, and nonathletes by means of a univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that table tennis players were clearly superior to other sports groups in the test tasks of sideward jumping and push-ups. Odds ratios for certain test performance thresholds were calculated to determine probabilities of later success. For a special table tennis recommendation score based on a selection of six of the nine tests, the identification and classification chances (sensitivity and specificity) were determined using a linear discriminant analysis and a neural network (multilayer perceptron). All in all, a medium to high prognostic validity could be proven with the complete motor test battery as well as with the table tennis recommendation score.