Sport schools have increased in popularity over the past three decades, and research in the area has proliferated. This study presents an overview of sport school literature, by investigating peer-reviewed articles, summarising the findings of relevant articles, and identifying possible gaps in this research area. In total, 55 articles are included. The descriptive summary reports publication year, study location, research design, methods, theoretical perspectives, population, and sport(s) studied. The thematic overview comprises two primary sections – research about sport schools and research in sport schools. The former cover ‘outside’ perspectives, such as socio-political and educational policy issues while the latter cover ‘inside’ perspectives focusing on the actors – student athletes and coaches. In the discussion it is acknowledged that pedagogical perspectives in sport school literature are limited, that research on sport schools’ admissions processes is overlooked, and concerns raised as to if sport schools are or should be socially inclusive.

In this article we use the concept of Communities of Practice (CoP) to understand how Swedish school sport teachers enact the admission process, the identification and selection of student athletes, to Swedish national upper secondary elite sport schools (SNESS). Data were gathered by conducting six focus group interviews involving 18 school sports teachers representing six different sports. The findings indicate that the admission process is influenced by and enacted through sport-specific CoPs and include a strategic identification of athletes, a set of tools – physical aptitude tests, sport-specific training, interviews, social activities – and documents (matrices, forms, interview-guides). While the process constitutes individual subjective assessments of athletes, the findings also imply that the teachers’ common engagement is the central enterprise of their collective actions. The admission is a cooperative process where the teachers expend their collective competence, joint cumulative experience, to identify, assess, and select student athletes.

Talent identification aims to discover athletes with qualities that suggest potential

future success in a specific sport. To aid in this quest, physical tests are frequently

used. However, the ability of such tests to predict future sporting success remains

underexplored, especially since it is rare for test results to be retrospectively ana-

lysed to determine whether those who later became successful athletes had fa-

vourable physical test outcomes in their youth. This study aims to analyse the

relationship between physical test results from a young age and future sporting

success in the context of cross-country skiing. A cohort design with a retrospec-

tive approach was utilised. The cohort consists of Swedish cross-country skiers (n

= 193) who underwent physical tests (n = 9) before being admitted into ski high

schools between 2002 and 2006. The test results of this cohort were analysed to

explore their potential to predict future sporting success, using FIS-points, the

official ranking and point system established by the International Ski and Snow-

board Federation. Sporting success has also been analysed in relation to variables

such as ski discipline (sprint and distance), sex and the relative age effect (birth

quartile). In general, it can be concluded that the test results had either no cor-

relation or a weak correlation with future sporting success across sprint and dis-

tance disciplines in cross-country skiing. Consequently, this study questions the

value of physical tests as an instrument in talent identification processes.