**Preface to "Talent Identification and Development in Youth Sports"**

How do talented children achieve expertise at adulthood? The identification of young athletes with the potential to develop and then subsequently excel as senior professionals in their specialist sport remains one of the major contemporary challenges for national governing bodies, sports clubs, coaches, and practitioners. As such, talent identification and development strategies have become pivotal to sporting organisations. The complexity of the process of nurturing youth through development trajectories towards adulthood has enhanced over recent years, with the implementation of modern multidisciplinary paradigms becoming increasingly prevalent in youth sport settings.

As part of this Special Issue, we sought to collaborate with researchers within the disciplines of talent identification and development in youth sports. More specifically, the overarching aim was to explore how youth's personal engagement in activities (i.e., the what), quality social dynamics (i.e., the who), and appropriate settings and organisational structures (i.e., the where) can foster immediate, short- and long-term developmental outcomes (see the Personal Assets Framework by Cotˆ e et al., 2014, 2016). In doing so, it was hoped that contributing research can inform evidence-based ´ youth sport policies and athlete development programmes. Submissions were encouraged from a diverse range of qualitative and quantitative data collection procedures to explore the current context of talent identification and development in youth sports. In addition, commentaries, conceptual papers, and reviews were welcome to synthesise expert knowledge within this discipline.

In total, 34 articles (31 empirical studies and three reviews) were included from 128 authors, many of whom are internationally recognised scholars and emerging researchers in this field. These authors represent universities or sport institutions (i.e., professional sport teams or national governing bodies) from across 20 countries. Owing to our approach, it is not surprising that 17 sports are studied within this Special Issue, which includes 13 studies comprising female participants. Overall, we believe our initial aims of progressing the talent identification and development literature have been achieved, and now hope that the research presented can be utilised by key stakeholders (e.g., administrators, coaches, parents, practitioners) and organisational structures (e.g., national governing bodies, professional clubs, recreational teams, youth sport associations) to create more appropriate youth sport settings.

#### **Adam Leigh Kelly, Sergio L. Jim´enez S´aiz, Sara Santos, and Alberto Lorenzo Calvo** *Editors*
