Reply to Zero kids born after Jan on a select team, wwyd if your child was born summer?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You’re going to be chasing this issue all the way through high school. It’ll sort of even out around junior year, but it is what it is.

The ideal scenario is your younger kid can make it and stick and eventually when the size differ risks normalize he’ll be the one that has an advantage, but that is going to be a tall order.

We chased this problem with our July birthday son and sort of felt it with our February birthday son who was a late bloomer. [/quote]

interesting! which sports would you avoid in this situation? [/quote]

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….[/quote]

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