trashleg said:
darthdevidem01 said:
Children born in September have a MUCH higher chance of being successful at basketball.
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Because their mother's were more likely to be exposed to sunlight in the latter stages of pregnancy, and thus gave birth to bigger babies, which then go on to be taller.. isn'tthat right?
I'm a January baby, 5'5". My brother and sister were both September, he's 6'6" and she's 5'8". :/
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It's because the cutoff age for signing up for basketball means they're usually around the "oldest" kids allowed on a team in any given year, meaning they are more likely to hit their growth spurts, therefore more likely to be bigger, therefore have a physical advatage that is also considered a skill one and thefore get more encoragement and catch the eye of coaches and "talent" coaches.
You see the same thing in Hockey... except it's like January. Same with Soccer.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=merron/081208
The first chapter in "Outliers" is about how some Canadian hockey players born in the first months of the year enjoy advantages that those born later in the year don't have. You also write that birth month correlates closely with success in other sports. Why is this?
It's a beautiful example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In Canada, the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey programs is Jan. 1. Canada also takes hockey really seriously, so coaches start streaming the best hockey players into elite programs, where they practice more and play more games and get better coaching, as early as 8 or 9. But who tends to be the "best" player at age 8 or 8? The oldest, of course -- the kids born nearest the cut-off date, who can be as much as almost a year older than kids born at the other end of the cut-off date. When you are 8 years old, 10 or 11 extra months of maturity means a lot.
So those kids get special attention. That's why there are more players in the NHL born in January and February and March than any other months. You see the same pattern, to an even more extreme degree, in soccer in Europe and baseball here in the U.S. It's one of those bizarre, little-remarked-upon facts of professional sports. They're biased against kids with the wrong birthday.
