ABSTRACT
Research on sport expertise has emphasized the large amounts of deliberate practice that must be amassed for aspiring athletes to become experts (see Côté and Fraser-Thomas, Chapter 2, and Baker and Cobley, Chapter 3). It is generally accepted that athletes need to engage in many years of continuous and focused training in sport before they may excel on an international stage. Talented performance is also the product of the environment in which an athlete interacts (i.e., training contexts) and the people with whom an athlete interacts in relation to their sport (e.g. peers, parents, and coaches). Developing athletes need to be motivated to practice on a near-daily basis over an extended period of time in order to attain expert levels of performance.
