Explaining who reaches the top in the sports world is often harder to do than might appear. The formula for success is often presented to us as the combination of talent, effort and, to a lesser extent, being in the right place at the right time, i.e. being lucky. However, there is one factor that is never mentioned but that can, in many cases, be the one that makes the difference between achieving success or getting left out of the picture, namely the month when a player is born.
It was in the 1980s when Roger Barnsley, a Canadian psychologist, realised that in the main junior and professional ice hockey leagues in his country, up to 42% of the players were born in the first quarter of the year, 30% in the second, and 19% and 9% in the third and fourth quarters, respectively.1 So there was a significant number of players born in the first 3 months of the year. Junior league players were almost 5 times more likely to be born in January than they were in December.1 Does that mean players born earlier in the year are more talented? Not at all. The explanation is quite simple. In Canada, the cut-off point between age levels is from January 1 to December 31 of each year, so children compete against others that have had a full additional year in which to mature. At an early age, a year can make a huge difference in terms of physical, maturational, social and affective development, the implication being that older players begin to stand out earlier, meaning that the coach offers them more opportunities, so they get more playing time and gain more experience, creating a scenario in which they get an even greater chance of being picked for their team and being trained by the best coaches, competing against the best rivals, training on the best facilities, and ultimately playing 20, 30 or 40 more games per season than their team-mates born in the last months of the year.
In football, where the cut-off date between age levels was set at July 31, this phenomenon also occurs.
Columbia Engineering/UCLA team is first to demonstrate that phase precession plays a significant role in the human brain, and links not only sequential positions, as seen in animals, but also abstract progression towards specific goals
… When I asked Vox readers if they were nervous about the return to normalcy, nearly 100 people responded with a resounding “yes.” They’re worried about the awkwardness of reacclimating to social life. They’re worried about returning to commutes and office work that added to their stress and chipped away at their quality of life. And they’re worried about returning to a new normal that looks much like the old normal — one whose flaws the pandemic threw into sharp relief.
As I read the responses, it struck me that there are actually two kinds of worry here. One is the anxiety we feel about doing anything we haven’t had to do in a while. For example, those of us who’ve had the luxury of working from home may find it nerve-wracking to go back to commuting in a crowded subway car or making small talk around the water cooler.
It’s very normal to feel this type of anxiety right now. Barnard College president Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist who researches anxiety for a living, told me she’s feeling it herself: “When you haven’t practiced in a while, anything can become harder or less fluent.”
England Manager Gareth Southgate has been using a piece of player performance software developed by the Football Association and Google Cloud.
The platform contains thousands of minutes of video clips and stats on everything from passes completed and shots on target, to fouls conceded and distance covered.
Zack Eberwein had his knee brace in his hands hours before hiking the Grouse Grind on the North Shore mountains on the day that would ultimately deliver the third “catastrophic” injury to his knee.
“Then I put it back on the shelf because I just felt it would have been too much of a hassle and I didn’t want to carry it with me … It often caused more pain than it helped prevent,” recalled the CEO of Vancouver’s Stoko Design Inc.
A recent journal article on running injuries starts with this gem as its first sentence: “Runners are subject to a high incidence of lower extremity injury of between approximately 20% to 80%.” This pseudo-stat, which originated in a 2007 systematic review by Dutch researchers, is a kind of running joke among researchers in the field—an opening line that admits that we basically don’t know anything about who gets injured and why.
It’s particularly appropriate in this case, because the new study ends up highlighting the depths of our ignorance. Researchers at Dublin City University, led by physiotherapist Sarah Dillon, explored whether it’s possible to predict which runners are most likely to get injured based on tests of simple characteristics like strength, flexibility, foot position, and asymmetry. The results, which appear in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, don’t say much for our ability to predict the future, but have some important implications for how we think about injury risk.
Sports specialization and physical activity levels don’t predict athletic movement quality or injury risk, a new study finds. But age does.
While early sports specialization has been linked to higher injury risk, the researchers found that age affected movement quality and neuromuscular balance more.
In the study, “Age Is More Predictive of Safe Movement Patterns Than Are Physical Activity or Sports Specialization: A Prospective Motion Analysis Study of Young Athletes,” published online on April 29, 2021 in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, they analyzed data on quality of physical movement, quantity of physical activity, and degree of sports specialization in a cohort of 147 healthy, active children and adolescents between the ages of 10 and 18 years.
With the lack of offseason programs and limited training camp, there was concern that the NFL injury rate would be higher in 2020. Overall, that does not seem to have been the case.
Of course, this is a small sample size with only one year of data. As always, numbers can be manipulated to “lie,” but my take is the numbers are relatively consistent with previous years.
The full discussion was on ProFootballDoc Podcast.
In a ground-breaking move Wednesday, the National Federation of State High School Associations Basketball Rules Committee approved for the 35-second shot clock in games beginning in the 2022-23 season.
It will be up to each state on whether to adopt the shot clock. The Arizona Interscholastic Association belongs to the NFHSA.
The NBA’s 3-point dependence is stronger than ever.
For the ninth consecutive season, the league record for 3-pointers made per game has been broken. Even if zero 3s are made in the final four days of a regular season that ends Sunday, the league’s average in 2020-21 will be higher than any other season.
Fairfield Sun Times (AZ), Cronkite News, Joshua Iversen and Koki Riley from
GateWay Community College coach Rob Shabansky admits he wasn’t a huge fan of technology and analytics in baseball.
He didn’t understand its true purpose, or the information it produced. He couldn’t grasp how this data could help improve the performance of his players on the diamond.
Shabansky, like many others in the baseball industry, was skeptical of this numbers-based approach.
“A lot of that information was, to a certain degree, recoded for people who really knew it,” Shabansky said. “But if you didn’t know it, you didn’t get much from it.”
The Stanford Daily student newspaper, Sofia Scekic and Cameron Ehsan from
… “Stanford’s misrepresentations to these students and their families is in violation of California law and threatens to cause them lasting irreparable harm,” said Jeffrey Kessler, an attorney for student-athletes on the eight teams. “The students are at the top of their game, and will lose the irreplaceable, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fulfill their dreams to compete at the varsity level if Stanford is not stopped from eliminating these teams.”
Rebecca Peterson-Fisher, an attorney representing athletes from the women’s teams, said that even before Stanford’s decision, athletic opportunities at the University were disproportionately afforded to men.
“Their plan to cut these teams will widen the gender gap even further,” Peterson-Fischer said in a statement. “Stanford cannot go forward with these planned cuts without further violating Title IX.”
