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> It's generally believed that this is caused by a discontinuity in youth sports: > 2. Within a given year, older kids are stronger, faster, etc., and perform

> It's generally believed that this is caused by a discontinuity in youth sports: > 2. Within a given year, older kids are stronger, faster, etc., and perform better I've seen a few youth ice hockey games and by god it's just unfair; there's a kid like a foot taller than the rest. I'm kind of surprised there isn't some system that buckets kids by size , it can't be fun for the small kids to get elbowed in the neck every time they bump the tall guy.

ddtaylor 3y ago
I remember playing basketball as a kid and being very entertained beating kids that were much taller than I was. Sure, they had the height, but they lacked so many fundamental skills and sometimes it was clear they didn't think they had to work very hard or do practice drills because they were tall. Fun fact, the ball and hoop don't care about any of that. It lets me steal it from you and it lets me put it into the hoop. The scorekeepers even add two to the scoreboard!
- gopher_space 3y ago
  > Fun fact, the ball and hoop don't care about any of that. Tangent: I grew up around a high school basketball coach and saw that all of the adults knew exactly who was going to college in which sport, and usually by late jr. high. We'd go to games just because he said some kid on the visiting team was going pro and that's exactly what happened.
  - robk 3y ago
    Can you expound more? How did this work across different fields of sport? I assume a basketball scout can recognize talent early in their domain but how is it crossing sports?
    - gopher_space 3y ago
      We're talking about people dedicated to the idea of "sport" in general getting excited about kids in local communities who are already talented and driven enough to be twice as good as their peers. Sports scouts follow up on phone calls more than they discover talent hidden away in the cornfield, if you see what I mean.
toast0 3y ago
If you've ever played Nintendo's Ice Hockey (1988), it's super realistic, and the tradeoffs of big vs little are clear: little guys bounce off of big guys and big guys move slow. My kid is in 12U youth hockey and is a big guy, and yeah, smaller kids can often usually skate around him, but if they bump into him, they fall over, and often he'll get a "big kid penalty" which means he gets a break in the penalty box for the crime of being tall and physically near a smaller player who fell over. We had to do a bit of coaching on how to make (allowed) physical contact so it reasonable contact doesn't look like prohibited contact (mostly be sure to have hands off when kids are falling, it's real easy to look like cross checking when it was actually just incidental contact). Some of the littler kids seem to have a lot of fun getting away with a lot more physical play than he can. Although he says he enjoys it when a small kid gets mad at him and tries to knock him over, too. So at least so far, seems like everyone is having fun. I don't think you can really just bucket kids by size and ignore age though... there's a lot of mental development between 10U hockey and 12U hockey, and putting a big 10 year old on the 12U team is often not right because the level of play is so much different, most 10 year olds won't keep up. At the same time, a small 12 year old on the 10U team is going to have a big advantage from age. Around here we do have two different leagues, one for 'recreational' teams and one for 'reputation' teams, and you more or less have to demonstrate a decent amount of skill to get on the rep team, and then you're playing with much better teams. All the teams are composed of a mix of big and small kids though. Edit to add: All that said, I think bucketing kids by age makes sense and I agree that there can be advantage to being at the extremes of the cohort. Since the US school system usually has a different cutoff date (september-ish) than US youth hockey (jan 1), you might see different results where there's grade level based high school hockey and age based youth hockey... but not in Canada where the cutoff is Jan 1 for both.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I think you could bucket by age but have the ability to move kids around. The problem is that these youth sports can get very competitive, and then people will be tempted to move the bigger kids down to get an advantage.
  - toast0 3y ago
MichaelZuo 3y ago
I noticed the same in Ontario, any kids who weren’t born in the first few months of the year had a huge disadvantage.

ddtaylor 3y ago

I remember playing basketball as a kid and being very entertained beating kids that were much taller than I was. Sure, they had the height, but they lacked so many fundamental skills and sometimes it was clear they didn't think they had to work very hard or do practice drills because they were tall. Fun fact, the ball and hoop don't care about any of that. It lets me steal it from you and it lets me put it into the hoop. The scorekeepers even add two to the scoreboard!

gopher_space 3y ago
> Fun fact, the ball and hoop don't care about any of that. Tangent: I grew up around a high school basketball coach and saw that all of the adults knew exactly who was going to college in which sport, and usually by late jr. high. We'd go to games just because he said some kid on the visiting team was going pro and that's exactly what happened.
- robk 3y ago
  Can you expound more? How did this work across different fields of sport? I assume a basketball scout can recognize talent early in their domain but how is it crossing sports?
  - gopher_space 3y ago
    We're talking about people dedicated to the idea of "sport" in general getting excited about kids in local communities who are already talented and driven enough to be twice as good as their peers. Sports scouts follow up on phone calls more than they discover talent hidden away in the cornfield, if you see what I mean.

toast0 3y ago

If you've ever played Nintendo's Ice Hockey (1988), it's super realistic, and the tradeoffs of big vs little are clear: little guys bounce off of big guys and big guys move slow. My kid is in 12U youth hockey and is a big guy, and yeah, smaller kids can often usually skate around him, but if they bump into him, they fall over, and often he'll get a "big kid penalty" which means he gets a break in the penalty box for the crime of being tall and physically near a smaller player who fell over. We had to do a bit of coaching on how to make (allowed) physical contact so it reasonable contact doesn't look like prohibited contact (mostly be sure to have hands off when kids are falling, it's real easy to look like cross checking when it was actually just incidental contact). Some of the littler kids seem to have a lot of fun getting away with a lot more physical play than he can. Although he says he enjoys it when a small kid gets mad at him and tries to knock him over, too. So at least so far, seems like everyone is having fun. I don't think you can really just bucket kids by size and ignore age though... there's a lot of mental development between 10U hockey and 12U hockey, and putting a big 10 year old on the 12U team is often not right because the level of play is so much different, most 10 year olds won't keep up. At the same time, a small 12 year old on the 10U team is going to have a big advantage from age. Around here we do have two different leagues, one for 'recreational' teams and one for 'reputation' teams, and you more or less have to demonstrate a decent amount of skill to get on the rep team, and then you're playing with much better teams. All the teams are composed of a mix of big and small kids though. Edit to add: All that said, I think bucketing kids by age makes sense and I agree that there can be advantage to being at the extremes of the cohort. Since the US school system usually has a different cutoff date (september-ish) than US youth hockey (jan 1), you might see different results where there's grade level based high school hockey and age based youth hockey... but not in Canada where the cutoff is Jan 1 for both.

bombcar 3y ago
I think you could bucket by age but have the ability to move kids around. The problem is that these youth sports can get very competitive, and then people will be tempted to move the bigger kids down to get an advantage.
- toast0 3y ago

MichaelZuo 3y ago

I noticed the same in Ontario, any kids who weren’t born in the first few months of the year had a huge disadvantage.