Meet Peddelsport Vlaanderen

Peddelsport Vlaanderen is the federation for paddle sports in Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. They currently support over 3,500 members through 38 clubs in 14 water sport disciplines, ranging from recreational paddling to Olympic-level competition. The Belgian national kayak team, also known as The Red Torpedoes, achieved 5th and 13th place at the Paris 2024 Olympics, and have ambitious goals for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

Annelies Dom is the sport-technical director of elite sports at Peddelsport Vlaanderen and is responsible for building the pathway that takes young paddlers from their first strokes in the club all the way to the podium. To detect and support talented athletes, Peddelsport Vlaanderen organises a yearly "talent day", inviting clubs and their most promising athletes to be evaluated in general and sport specific skills.

Why Peddelsport Vlaanderen chose Hylyght to improve their talent development program

Although the talent days provide valuable information for the federation and have improved their talent development plans, over time, a few structural issues became clear:

• Athletes were judged on their performance on one single day, a bad day could heavily skew the results.
• Some clubs started training specifically towards the talent day, making fair comparison between clubs harder.
• The format created the perception that athletes were being labelled "talented" or "not talented."
• Clubs received little to no feedback they could actually use afterwards.

To solve these challenges, Peddelsport Vlaanderen partnered with Hylyght to shift from a centralized, one-off evaluation to longitudinal monitoring at the club level. Rather than a verdict handed down once a year, clubs now get the tools to follow up the development of their own athletes, generating actionable results they can immediately act on. By providing the testing framework and making the tools normally reserved for the elite athletes available to everyone, the federation empowers clubs to support the development of all athletes, not just those who were labelled as talented.

For the federation, this also creates a much stronger basis for communication with clubs. Everyone works in a shared testing framework, and the federation's direction and goals become more tangible. That, in turn, makes clubs more engaged and opens the door to real interaction instead of one-way reporting. Paddle clubs often have a strong, family-like atmosphere, which is part of what makes the sport special, but it can also make it harder to align methods and interests across the federation. The standardised but flexible tools and protocols in Hylyght give clubs a shared reference point and a clear direction, without taking away that local character.

Ultimately, the goal reaches further than talent identification alone. By bringing elite-sports best practices into everyday club training, Peddelsport Vlaanderen wants to raise the overall quality of coaching across the board. A broader, more qualitative base at club level means a stronger and more talented pool feeding into the elite pathway. The decentralised testing also results in more data that the federation can analyse to get insights into the talent pathways, and to determine better norm values. This creates a positive feedback loop between the federation and the clubs.

By also monitoring the biological maturity of the athletes, norm values can eventually be adjusted to maturity timing. This provides insight into not just current performance, but also the remaining potential, ensuring late-bloomers aren't lost as 'false negatives' in the selection system.

One platform, no more scattered spreadsheets

Alongside the shift away from a single talent day, the federation had a second, more practical motivation: bringing physical and motor development monitoring together in one longitudinal system. Before Hylyght, this data lived across scattered Excel sheets, SharePoints, and individual club records, making it difficult to track athletes over time or compare data across the federation. Hylyght now gives Peddelsport Vlaanderen a single platform to follow every athlete's development over the course of their career.

Practical rollout: a lighter test battery for clubs

Peddelsport Vlaanderen wants the monitoring to be carried out locally and continuously rather than once a year in a central location. As clubs do not always have the necessary equipment and resources to conduct the full talent screening, Peddelsport Vlaanderen is rolling out a light version for the clubs. However, adapting the test battery for clubs comes with new challenges. To be practical for both the clubs and the federation, the light test battery needs to:

• Be easy to score, without ambiguity
• Follow a straightforward protocol, so tests aren't administered incorrectly
• Require no special equipment
• Take up as little training time as possible

Therefore, Annelies is currently translating the full test battery into the light version that clubs can realistically run themselves, while still producing reliable, comparable results. Following up on how this lighter battery performs in practice as it rolls out across clubs remains an important next step. Consequently, Peddelsport Vlaanderen isn't abandoning its talent days altogether. The federation still uses its full test battery for elite-level evaluation, including some lab-based tests that cannot be conducted at club level. The central talent day also still serves as a validation test for the athletes whose club-based results stick out. This way, the federation can follow up the validity of the light version used in the clubs, and can provide feedback to the clubs if test results from the federation don’t match those of the clubs.

Looking ahead

For Peddelsport Vlaanderen, this is a long-term project. Improving the sport at the grassroots level takes time: knowledge, experience, and best practices need to take root in the clubs themselves, not just at the federation. The talent pathway runs from a child's first paddle stroke all the way to the podium, and Annelies sees Hylyght as a partner that can support that pathway at every stage along the way. In the first stage, Hylyght will be used to monitor athletes aged 15-18 years old. In the near future, the Hylyght platform will serve not only as a platform for test results, but also an interdisciplinary communication tool for the elite athletes, bringing together results of physical performance and medical screenings.

If you're a federation or club looking to bring structure, consistency, and longitudinal insight to your talent development pathway, discover how Hylyght's Talent Identification & Development solution can help. Or plan a call with Lode