Our coach assigned us to read Talent Code written by David Coyle would be enlightening and help us to understand and improve our learning curve.  Like myself many athletes on the Women’s National Rugby Team are very new to the sport.  It is imperative that as a team we accelerate our learning curve, so that we can be consistently competitive with the top teams in the world.   The Talent Code could prove to be a valuable asset to assist us in understanding how we learn so that we can improve our deep practice.

Recently we reviewed chapter five, which talked about motivation and how motivation is ignited in different people.  To me, the most interesting part of the chapter was when Coyle discussed the backgrounds and the birth order of world class sprinters.  The majority of the high level sprinters were close to the last born.  Coyle hypothesized that this fact was largely due to the face that the younger children were always behind their older siblings and needed to learn to be faster so that they were more able to catch up. 

I certainly relate to Coyle’s conclusion.  My older sister, Amber, is 13 months older than I am.  I remember as a child always trying to compete at the level she did.  A few times I was able to play up and age group and play with the older kids.  I was always a little behind the older kids, but was forced to learn at an accelerated rate so that I was able to be competitive.  I definitely had my moments that I struggled athletically to keep, but I believe it helped to push me and required a lot of hard work.  I would always race my sister and never seemed to be able to win, but it was a key point in motivated me to train and improve.  In retrospect I believe having a sibling slightly older than me enhanced my ability to learn.