| Abstrakt: |
Background: The basketball game is composed of intermittent short and intense actions of sprinting, jumping, and changing directions requiring a good level of physical fitness, strength, and motor coordination. Specific basketball task tests to assess players' motor tasks and performance are commonly used in research and applied contexts to distinguish between-athletes variations. In this study, we considered athletes engaged in structured basketball programs of Santa Catarina, supervised by Federação Catarinense de Basketball (FCB). Aim: We examined whether performance in basketball-specific tasks was sensitive to distinguish between female and male young players selected or not selected to represent the state team that competed at national-level competitions. Furthermore, we adjusted our estimations to the influence of accumulated training experience in basketball and chronological on basketball-specific tasks. Material and methods: This sample comprised 172 young basketball players (female, n = 73; male n = 99) aged 14.5 and 18.5, competing in under-16 and under-18 age groups. We grouped players by sex and competitive level (players from club-level and state-level, i.e., those selected for the Santa Catarina team competing at a national competition). In addition, we considered the following basketballspecific tasks: the countermovement jump without arms (CMJ) as a measure of lower body muscle power, the Line-Drill test (LD) as a measure of agility ability and anaerobic performance, and the 20 m Sprint as a measure of speed. Finally, we modeled the variation on the basketball-specific task between players by competitive level, adjusting for chronological age and accumulated experience by fitting multilevel regression models using a fully Bayesian approach. Results: There was substantial variation in the basketball-specific tasks by sex and older players had better jumping and sprint performance. Also, there was a trend of more experienced players showing a better performance in the LD, although variation was large, suggesting a conservative interpretation. There was no substantial variation between players by competitive level. Conclusion: Although basketball-specific tests are commonly used to interpret players' performance, older players performed better. The specific motor tasks were not sensible to distinguishing athletes by competitive level, independent of sex. The tasks used may be insensitive to distinguish players by competitive level, or the variation in the competitive level in the present sample may be small. On the other hand, the tasks were sensitive to players' differences in chronological age and training experience, suggesting that other factors had more weight on coaches' decisions in selecting players for the state team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
