The relationship between athletic movement competency and change of direction ability in young sub-elite soccer players

1. Introduction and Purpose Soccer requires players to perform physically demanding actions, embracing technical (e.g., dribbling) and motor tasks (e.g. change of direction speed, CODS) with a certain movement competency. The movement competency appears to play a central role within injury prevention processes (Woods et al., 2015). Reasonably, assessing a player that changes direction with a poor execution of dynamic cutting movements become crucial to prevent potential increase of injury risk. Despite the Functional Movement Screen being widely used to assess general movement competency, it has been shown its weak association with physical performance tests (i.e., specific movement competency) (Garrett et al., 2017). Recently, it has been proposed an alternative test battery (i.e., Athletic Ability Assessment), which is designed to assess movement competency encompassing common strength and conditioning drills (McKewon et al., 2014). Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between athletic ability assessment and change of direction speed performance in young sub-elite soccer player. 2. Methods Sixteen young elite soccer players were enrolled in the study (mean ±SD; age: 16.03±0.14 years, weight: 61.62 ± 7.97 kg, height: 1.76 ± 0.07 m). Sprint test with 90° turns (S90), sprint test with 180° turns (S180) and T-drill test were selected to evaluate players’ ability at changing direction. The athletic movement competency was evaluated by the Ability Athletic Assessment (AAA), which encompass prone hold, lateral bound, side hold, overhead squat, single-leg squat, walking lunge, single-leg hop, push ups, and chin ups. Each movement was scored using a three-point scale; a specific scoring criterion is anchored to a numeric value performing a total of five repetitions for each item, excepting the chin-up and the push-up. The maximum available score for each sub-test is out of 9 reaching a total score of 63 points (McKewon et al., 2014). As regards CODS, the players were asked to perform three trials in all tests and the best result was taken into account within the analysis. The relationship between the AAA score with running time of T-drill, S90 and S180 was performed by Pearson’s correlation coefficient (r). The correlation coefficients were interpret using the following magnitude scale with specific descriptors: <0.1, trivial; 0.1-0.3, small; 0.3-0.5, moderate; 0.5-0.7, large; 0.7-0.9, very large; > 0.9, nearly perfect. 3. Results The mean score observed on the AAA was 76.87 ± 10.35 and the running times obtained from CODS tests were 6.37 ± 0.22 s, 8.13 ± 0.30 s and 9.71 ± 0.30, respectively. The score observed in the AAA presented large negative correlations with running time of T-drill (p = 0.004) and S90 (p = 0.003), respectively (Figure 1,2). Additionally, a very large negative correlation was found between AAA score and the running time of S180 (p < 0.0001) (Figure 3). 4. Conclusions The main finding of the present study suggest that players with higher movement competency are more prone to perform better in CODS performance. Furthermore, it seemed that this association is stronger when considering CODS with wider angles of turns as mirrored by S180 performance. From an injury prevention point of view, these results encourage the use of AAA for monitoring athletic movement skills and obtaining additional information on players’ ability to address soccer-related physical demands (i.e., CODS). Furthermore, Woods et al. (2015) found that AAA was an suitable tool to differentiate between competitive level in Australian football. Indeed, elite senior players were competent at performing fundamental athletic movement (i.e., double lunge, single-leg Romanian deadlift, push-up and chin-up) than less skilled players. With this in mind, strength and conditioning staff should focus their attention to develop well-designed exercises targeted to improve strength, power, speed and balance for performance enhancement and injury prevention. However, further studies are needed to examine potential relationship of AAA with other different movement tasks (CODS with ball or reactive agility) including players with higher level of play (e.g., elite or professional).