Relative age effect has a significant impact on the youth athletes sporting experience. It is often the reason that players are selected or deemed as talented at younger ages, as their effectiveness is misunderstood to be talent, where it largely the physical and cognitive bias due to their birth date; the bigger, stronger, faster, individual dominating over the smaller, slower, less physically developed individual due to their date of birth.
What is Relative Age Effect?
Relative Age Effect (RAE) is an observed effect where athletes at the top level of sports were born in months earlier in their sports relative cut-off period. If the cut-off for a sports league is December 31st, an athlete born in January is 11 months older than an athlete they are competing against who is born in December.
https://usatodayhss.com/2017/relative-age-effect-is-when-you-are-born-more-important-than-how-good-you-will-be
Impact of Relative Age Effect
Researchers have found that cut-off dates for school eligibility can have a long-term impact on student performance because it can cause some students (those born just after the cut-off date) to be older and more mature than others (those born just before the cut-off date) when they begin school. Skills accumulated in early childhood complement later learning, which means that relative age differences at the start of formal schooling can be long-lasting if relatively older students are better positioned to accumulate more skills in the early academic years because of their cognitive and emotional maturity advantage.
The idea that arbitrary eligibility cut-off dates can have sizeable consequences is even stronger in sport where, in addition to cognitive and emotional development, physical development plays an important role. After all, scouts choose children according to what they see.
Youth sports are organised by age brackets according to a cut-off birth date. In most European youth football leagues the cut-off date is 1 January. In the UK it is 1 September. Players born just after the cut-off tend to be stronger, bigger, more mature, and have more coordination, greater self‑esteem and better decision-making skills than players born at the end of the eligibility year. Since several months of development can make a huge difference in these variables, these players tend to perform better in a given game, watched by scouts, and are more likely to be identified as talented than those born in the later part of the eligibility year. Once selected, they benefit from having more high‑quality coaching, deliberate practice and experience, and are given more opportunities to further their development.
A skewed birth distribution over-representing individuals born early in the selection year has been documented extensively for many other sports, (including rugby, tennis, baseball and ice hockey), in many countries, and was found to be prevalent in youth and senior competitions. The effect remains even to the top level.
Of course, talent does not depend on exactly when you were born, so the talent detection system shows a huge relative age‑effect bias
What Can We Do About It?
At Fremont YSC we have addressed this in a number of different ways, and ways in which to support not only the individual player, but also to help support the parents awareness of relative age effect.
- What? No player in the U8 to U10 age groups is cut from the program, all players are welcome. We believe this should go up until U12, but we are also held back by the US culture of winning, as this has a knock on effect of how clubs are selecting players and approaching games on weekends.
- This immediately removes the bias of selection, as coaches are not looking to pick a player to impact the team, but instead players are deciding whether they want to play for the club, and be part of a learning process.
- Players are placed into groups of similar birth months, where physical and cognitive development rates are similar. In addition, our club structure allows coaches to move players throughout the season, where maturation is a consideration both physically and cognitively so placed in appropriate groups, and not groups being created based on effectiveness to win games.
- How? We do not place an emphasis on winning, but are process driven and encourage learning from experiences.
- When coaches know they are not judged on outcome, but the environment created and alignment to the process, this has a positive effect o players as they are all given the same opportunities.
- We do need the parent support with this, as external pressure will interfere and have an effect.
- Who? We account for all players from U9 to U16, early and late developers must be a consideration.
- All players jersey numbers are assigned based on their date of birth, and not their placement on a team.
- This helps as a reminder to parents about their child’s age within a group, and how factors out of their control can effect their rate of development, so not to compare to others.
- As a club we define success as an individual journey, were our objective is to support players to reach the identification programs of external pathways into regional and national selection, PDP and ODP.
Through a framework and structure that supports the individual player, we remove the bias from relative age effect, and focus is always on the individual, and curriculum is designed to be proactive at age appropriate phases, factoring in the physical and psychosocial needs of the player. All curriculum design and periodized training is supported by evidence based research, which ensures the youth player is getting the best possible opportunity, no matter their date of birth, and being coached like a youth player, so not to be specializing early or treated like a professional. Professionalism comes from the clubs operations and coaches behavior’s.
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