interesting! which sports would you avoid in this situation? |
What? Most kids are born after Jan. 11/12 of the kids are born after Jan. |
| So weird |
I’m talking about the school year calendar (turning age for grade before or after Jan 1) A team is compromised of 20 children, but 100 percent of the team has Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec birthdays or a holdback (4/12 months = 33 percent of the year). Zero kids on the team have Jan, Feb, March, April, May, June, July and Aug birthdays which accounts for 66 percent of the year. It just seems ridiculous to me that not a single child would fall into a post January birthday on this team. Numbers don’t make sense. In a typical school year, |
Grade-based sports (like basketball and LAX) the issue is huge. Strict age-based (baseball/soccer) it isn’t as big of a deal, especially as they get older. The issue is this: an 8.5 year old kid is 12.5% older than an 8 year old kid, an 10.5 year old is 5% older than a 10 year old. That’s a big deal. Perhaps not in every individual case, but across populations, the age differential is a material advantage. People will dismiss the issue, but it is well documented and observed. Presently, college basketball has directionally evolved toward a trend where older, not as talented teams win championships while younger, more talented teams don’t even though the younger players are the ones that end up playing professionally. The athletic differential between a 19 year old and a 23 year is still material. As for youth sports with grade based classifications, it isn’t just your on time grade that is a problem: it is the other held back kids that are in your grade. Say you have a March birthday and your child is on time for school. That may not sound like an issue right off the bat, but he’ll end up going against May-July HELD BACK kids. That’s 6-9 months of age differential and it makes an impact. I came across a February held back birthday recently which blew my mind. Is the impact impossible to overcome? No. But it is an extremely tall task. Our Basketball club team has a tournament A and B team, with the A being the clearly superior team. It breaks almost perfectly along age with the A team having 80% of the roster being held back and the B having 100% of the roster on time for grade. Then add in things like early and late bloomers and you can get into weird circumstances in grade based sports. The growth timing issue is really exacerbated by the hold back thing. An early bloomer who was also held back is just at a material advantage in their youth. Our late bloomer was steadily around 50th percentile for height but as other kids got growth spurts early he trended toward 25th percentile for age. When he was in fifth grade his tournament team went to a national event and they went against a pair of twins who were May birthdays that were held back and were already over 6 feet tall and pushing 180 pounds. You never know why someone is held back and you don’t want to impute malice on others, but the mom of these boys was built like a Minnesota linebacker. They had good reason to know their kids would be huge…. |
D you realize there are sports whrrr you have to compete against kids 24 months older than you ? |
Yes. What is your point? |
Yes, but it’s hard being at the bottom for everything in age. Especially if you’re a lb athletic young kid on the line of making a team and a kid 15 months older gets a spot that’s in the same grade. |
| Because just logically you would assume a 10 year old basketball player that is able to keep up and has identical skill to a just turned 12 year old is actually more athletic and likely a little more deserving. The older kid is just older. |