Development of Skill Performance Test for Talent Identification in Amateur Skateboarding Sport

Talent identification is a vital process of mapping out athletes with the potentiality to excel in the future sporting career. To ensure success in this process, appropriate skill test in tandem to the capability of the athlete level is required to avoid dropout and demotivation of the athletes. A variety of skateboarding tricks are available for testing and identification of potential skateboarders, however, many of such skills are hard to deliver properly particularly for amateurs. The present investigation is aimed at identifying the suitable skateboarding tricks that could be used for mapping out talent in amateur skateboarding. The most common skateboarding tricks that consisted of Ollie, Kickflip, Shove-it, Nollie and Frontside 180 were identified while an experienced amateur skateboarder executed each skill five times. A customized ORY skateboard integrated with IMU sensors were used to stream the data in real-time during the performance of the tricks. The average datasets from the acceleration and angular velocity of the x, y and z-axis were obtained and a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to study the dimension of the related data tricks as well as to identify the important trick manoeuvres that could be suitable for the level of the athlete’s performance. The results revealed that the dataset contained two dimensions based on the Eigenvalue analysis of the PCA whilst Ollie and Nollie tricks were identified to be the most important tricks due to their higher factor loading (>0.80). It is therefore postulated that the Ollie and Nollie tricks could be used as a skill related test for the identification of talented amateur skateboarders. This may be invaluable to coaches and talent scouters in saving time, effort as well as manpower during the talent identification program in this sport.