Reply to At what age do you think you can tell whether a kid has potential to be an athlete?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Good Athletes - Like D1 or even pro level athleticism? I'd say around age 7 I can tell. It is hard to describe but you know when you see it.

High School athletes? Middle school or beyond. Most schools you can work hard and make a team and even be a starter. But the high level athletes that play on TV every weekend all have something the rest of us don't have. [/quote]
You sound like my DH, who was able to project out the maximum potential achievement level of each kid on my son’s U9 soccer team, assuming they put in the time athletically and academically and weren’t derailed by life. I was highly skeptical at the time.  A decade+on, he nailed almost every kid, ranging from the one he described as D1/pro potential, the couple D3/borderline D1, the category of “will likely make varsity at a minimum”, the couple of “may make JV/wont make varsity” kids (both of whom made JV for one year), the one he predicted would excel at a different sport, and the others who he said didn’t have the coordination or other baseline athletic traits to play beyond rec.

It’s obviously easier to project out for a sport like soccer, where size is not determinative for most positions, but I still think my DH has an uncanny and unusual ability to recognize which kids are fundamentally athletic and which aren’t at a young age. I don’t think most of us have this ability, including most youth coaches. Therefore, I think it’s a bit of a pointless question.  If your kid likes sports, encourage them to keep it up for all the benefits sports offers, and time will take care of letting you know what level they can succeed at. [/quote]

The notion that coordination is an innate, fixed quality seems very silly to me.  The reality is that coordination is developed, and — at least for basketball players — the uncoordinated MS kids are often going to be good in HS.  They are uncoordinated because they are growing at an incredible rate, and once they stop growing they are fine.

I was uncoordinated as hell until I took up MMA in my 20s and spent untold hours specifically working on hand eye coordination.  I actually discovered in the same weekend at a work retreat that I could hit a golf ball and a softball (after telling all my coworkers that I couldn’t) despite not having tried either in years and years.  [/quote]

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