I could name five clubs in my area that have their A teams with players born in August - October, at least 20 out of 22. Most coaches, yeah, no they don't. I don't agree that "most" older players stand out, most excellent players standout. If your son or daughter is June or July, yes at age 10 they will likely be less mature than those born in August and September of the previous year. But the best players is not always the oldest.
Not following you. You say that the top teams are comprised of players born in August-October but then you say that you don't agree that older players stand out. Why, then, do you think that the top teams are comprised of players born in August-October? Coincidence? There's been a lot of study on this issue bearing out the FACT that players born in the first quartile of their age range have a distinct advantage over players born in the last quartile. This is also what you would expect, so it's not exactly controversial. It's also borne out by most people's empirical experences, again as you would expect. Sure, there is a handful of players in every area who are just freakishly good and stand out regardless of their birth date, but that doesn't undermine the central premise with respect to the non-super star players. Just think, if you pick ten soccer players born on August 1, 2005 and put them on a team and have them play a game against 10 players born on July 31, 2006, and you don't know anything else about these two teams, which team are you picking to win?
If a kid is a whole year older as a senior from repeating 9th grade, or even 1st grade, been in clubs starting the same age as everyone else..., do you think college recruiters are going to notice these individuals are a little bigger, faster, and a years training smarter?
Yes and no. I think if two players had the same training and one was 19 and the other 18, age would be highly unlikely to be a distinguishing factor. However, if the older one got advantages early on in terms of being placed on better teams, better coaching, more playing time, etc., because he was perceived as being advanced due to a birth date advantage over the others in his age group, then the compounded effect could be significant.
Agree - most clubs don't like kids playing up. It is easier on the club if kids play their age and the top club teams will be more successful in competition against other clubs. Keeping the early maturing kids at age in at U12-U14 is especially important to clubs as these are the kids that win championships and in the process get stunted later on because they were never forced develop technical and tactical skills that they will need to compete with when no longer dominant.
I think the rest of your post was very well stated. But in general (but obviously not always) kids who show great talent pre-puberty (6-10) tend to end up very talented post puberty assuming they keep training at a high level. Where things really get become distorted is during puberty when some kids with bodies of near men are competing against others that still have the body of a 10 year old. It is not surprising that the U14 national team pool will be filled with the former and you will never hear from the latter until some unknown kid becomes a college star.
It absolutely matters for the best. If you look at the U17 national team pool you will the most of the kids are born the first quarter after the cut-off date which in this case is January. Similarly, if you look at DA academy rosters you will find a disproportionate amount of players born in the first half of the year. Another example is that one brother born late in the year was a High School superstar his freshman year. In contrast the other brother born early in the year barely made the HS team as a freshman. But for academy the roles were completely reversed. The early year brother was the player who was asked to play up a year in academy while the one born late in the year was not. In the end when age and maturing evened out, both ended up playing at the same college.
Good list. But you are probably missing the most important factor which is natural athleticism. Some kids are going to be able to dunk a ball with limited training while others will never be able to dunk one no matter how they train. While dunking a ball is not a critical athletic ability in soccer, quickness, agility, power etc. are. Lots of kids in the world have 1, 6, 7 but the guys you see on TV were great athletes compared to their peers. When they are no longer great athletes compared to their peers they either retire or move to leagues that are not on TV.
(Disclaimer: We're no longer talking about birth date advantage here, but rather about the trajectory of super star youth talents.) Yes, I agree that kids who show great talent at 6-8 (putting aside ages 9-10, which were not part of my original point and are very different in my view) usually end up very talented. I do think that the gulf between these players and the next traunch of players is bridged in large part by around 13 years old. Put another way, these players are still exceptional but no longer dominant. The reason, in my experience, is that dominant players at age 8 and below usually are dominant mostly due to having extremely advanced coordination and focus levels for their age. These advantages disappear vis-a-vis the other kids who succeed in developing advanced coordination and focus.
It seems more like a complaint, that "my kid is not getting a fair shake due to his birth date" than reality. I saw a post about a kid on a calendar year team, born in the late months of the year, and his father was complaining. Do you not know it is a calendar year team? If it bothers you, there are many teams that are not calendar year. The best way to remove the birth date and size/strength advantages is to get your kid more training, if they want it and if you can afford it. As for clubs who "don't like playing up", they better be large enough and have a good enough reputation to have excellent A teams, or they won't attract better players. My son's club is relatively small, about 6 boys teams and 6 girls teams, so two boys teams in the top ten of the state is pretty good. I don't think I have seen one ad for a U18 team looking for players that did not say "U18 or top U17 player", knowing that by that age, there's just not enough U18 players around.
Birth date advantage clearly is a real thing and not a made-up excuse. No one should feel sorry for the parents of birth date disadvantaged kids. This is not about parents. This is about youth soccer players and what it means for player and team development when you have a system that gives inherent advantages to certain players based on their birth dates. This is an issue that has received considerable attention and research from sports academia. It was one of the main points of one of the most influential sports development books of the last 25 years (i.e., Outliers). To suggest that the issue should be fixed by having one quarter of the player pool go get extra training to keep up with the other three quarters seems more than a little unrealistic and dismissive to me.
Agree with all this. It's definitely a "real thing" and the point isn't "woe is me". The point is, or should be, to recognize that to some degree, accidents of birth are doing some weeding of the talent pool unless we recognize that and alter some practices. In the long run, that may seem unfair and not the best use of resources, but for individuals it might not be a bad solution. If you can find a way for a "late bloomer" to keep up and keep his/her interest in the game alive while he/she plays catch-up physically, then you can really mitigate the situation. After all, the whole reason for this isn't because older kids in an age cohort are "better" but rather that they have an early size/speed/strength advantate which gets translated into more playing time, more attention, more opportunities. Find a way to get the U-9 All-Star team benchwarmer more touches on his/her own for the next few years, and he/she is much less likely to be left behind.
I'm not concerned about the fairness of it, I just think it's unrealistic as a general proposition. True "soccer families" may be willing to do this, but your run of the mill kids will just move on to different sports. One alternative would be to have 6 month age brackets instead of full year brackets. This would be great and would really fix the problem in those areas with sufficient number of players to achieve critical mass with truncated age bands. Another option would be to at least take the age disadvantage into account when evaluating kids in tryouts. Many clubs preach a developmental focus over winning, so those clubs should have no problem eschewing a player that might help them win due to his age in favor of a kid who shows more long term potential. Not sure of the exact fix, but it should be systematic rather than "every man for himself" if you really hope to fix it.
There is a lot more about extra training and playing up (even with adults when a young teen) in stories of succesful US MNT players. I just grabbed Clint Dempsey's and Landon Donovan's birth dates, and they both are the first week of March. Aren't they at a disadvantage compared to those born in January and February? Or is the fact that their parents took them around the country, and let them play with older kids and adults more significant? Or how about coaches who ignored that Landon Donovan isn't tall? I know many coaches of top teams who would hesitate to consider him at all because of his height. The table listed by midsouthsoccer shows October, November, March and May as the most common birth months on the US MNT. It also shows January almost as bad as December in terms of how many players on the US MNT have that birth month. Think it would be wise to induce labor in November to give your son a better chance to get on the US MNT? I am *NOT* making a suggestion and being dismissive, I am telling you that my son, who was born in the last few months of the Aug -> Jul club year and small, addressed his possible birthdate and size disadvantage by extra training. It not only helped him directly with soccer, but helped him mature and learn to follow directions. Why shouldn't the parents and the child even out the playing field with extra training, if there is anything to even out? You aren't going to get into a time machine and change your child's birthdate. And if a coach is so dumb to look at age, size, and speed solely, ignoring things like soccer skill (you don't have to be fast to thread a pass) and field sense (knowing where to be is more important than ball chasing), why would you want your child to be on his team? If things are tough, ask your child if they want to keep playing. If you can afford it, get them more training, get them on another team too, get them into camps. If you can't afford it, find a park where there is pickup soccer. If they can't make the A team, get on a B team and be leagues ahead of their teammates. If there isn't a big club in the area, play with a smaller club and play up as much as you can. The inherent problem is more about choice in team and club. If you are in an area with one marquee soccer club and few others, it's going to be a problem if they focus on size or birthdate and your child doesn't fit the mold. If you are in a prime soccer area, your child will find a team, birth date favorable or not.
Run of the mill kids won't succeed at other sports either. Doesn't football look at size and age when they pick teams (Pop Warner)? Do you know any youth sports teams that go by six month increments? Do you know any "non-sports" parents who will accommodate their child traveling around the region? Same thing for music, any kid with talent is going to be trying out for county or regional groups, and if the parents won't drive, the kid won't do it no matter the skill. The trend is the opposite, as shown by the two-year USSF DA teams. No one wants to fix the system for "run of the mill" kids. They need rec not a committed team. I live near NYC, and many folks are crazy about soccer, to the point that NFL fans acknowledge our existence. Developmental is fine, but not one top club will consider their A team developmental, that's why they have B and C teams. If a club is so misguided that it puts the biggest kids on the A team and the rest are on the B and C team, from pre-teen to teenaged years, that's up to them. What TR at NJSA says and too many others say, is that your child is supposed to "suck it up" and deal with being on a B or C team at a "top club" because they are small or young or both. And then magically, after 8 years on B and C teams, they'll break through to the A team. That is a fairy tale. You find a team where your child is appreciated, born in the second half of the year or not, small for their age (or even average...) or not. And if that is a B team, you get outside training, but if and only if your child actually wants to pursue soccer seriously. Why even bother with leveling the playing field if you child does not want to pursue soccer in college or even HS? And if your child does have a passion for soccer, or any other sport, or an instrument or singing, you get them outside training. It is very difficult to find pick-up soccer, and training and extra team play is often the only substitute.
Again, I think the statistical argument that @dcole is making is not being responded to in kind. So I think we're having two separate conversations. Having said that, my response is at the micro level. I think you can't just say a run of the mill kid won't succeed at other sports. A run of the mill kid may be a kid born in June 2002. He/she would be amongst the youngest kids in U12 soccer (4th quarter of age group year), but 1st quarter of U11 baseball age group year. Size, speed, strength and hand/foot-eye coordination disadvantage in soccer turns in to advantage in baseball. In addition, in my area at least, football and lacrosse goes strictly by school grade. Thus, you are not dealing with the birth date lottery issue, but parents that game the system. This is the practice of kindergarten redshirting. I suppose this is typically done for academic reasons, but in my football/lacrosse crazy town I am sure that the practice is driven by sports. In my son's age group, it's not unusual to find kids born in January - March 2001 in the sixth grade trying out for football and lacrosse teams against kids born in October - December 2002. Lacrosse may be in the midst of changing to birth year with August cutoff, but I'm sure there will be kicking and screaming.
As the parent of a kid who was a pipsqueak and still is not that tall, it just did not matter whether he was in the third quarter of the club soccer year (which he is), or if he was among the oldest on the team (for ODP he is first quarter). He wasn't going to go from 5' tall at age 13 to 5'6" at age 13.5. But in the summers when his older taller teammates were going on vacation, he played on a summer team. He had soccer training outside of his team, and speed-agility-quickness training. He saw results. His height didn't shoot up, but he got stronger and faster and better, and his teammates who were relying on age and size who did not train began to slip. "It's a shame" if a kid is younger and therefore needs outside tutoring to succeed in school. "It's a shame" if a kid is younger and therefore needs outside training to succeed at a chosen sport. But sometimes, that kid who was "left behind" overtakes the competition who were doing okay, because he or she did get extra help, help that all students or players would benefit from. I have a cousin who is less than 4' tall as an adult. I have a good friend who is blind. I just wonder if it is a symptom of having it too good to find birth date advantage a pervasive and difficult to surmount obstacle. But I certainly agree that there is no solution to it whether it exists or not, other than to plan your kids' birthdates more carefully.
Thanks for your input dcole. I think my son has some similarities to yours - his limitations in soccer seem more mental then physical at this stage. He has good speed and size and stacks up reasonably well from that standpoint in the older age group. So for the most part it is not really the expected age issue of the older kids being faster, stronger - some are but most aren't. It is that when he gets among the better, more serious kids he does not seem capable of the same focus and intensity that some of them are. That can turn into the assigned coaches (we have temp coaches for crossover and all star game situations) giving some of the kids more central roles and my kid a more marginal role. I actually think he has pretty good skill but there is limited time to observe every kid's particulars in these situations. His birth month is a few months later than your son's so we actually have the option of holding him back and starting travel a year later with the next age group. In that group he should probably stand out. Right now I am leaning in that direction and look at playing up sometime later depending on how well he does. I want to avoid putting him in a lousy travel situation where he is marginalized and may lose confidence and enthusiasm.
The focus and intensity levels will come with age. Which school grade is he in: the one he is playing up with or the one you would hold him back in? Longer term, I'd be tempted to put him with the kids in his school grade, whichever group that might be. But holding him back with his soccer age group would make sense until he matures. If he's in the school grade with the younger soccer age group, it's a no-brainer: hold him back with the lower soccer age group.
Good observation - he is in the lower grade. Now that we have made that decision for school, probably better to start with the same decision for competitve soccer.
My second son is 4 with a June birthday. He has some speech issues and we plan to hold him back a year. That will make him one of the older ones in Kindergarten the next year. All of this was done for scholastic reasons. As a dad who likes sports, you can bet I have already starting thinking about the sports where he will have an age advantage (e.g. baseball June, football grade year, lacrosse grade year).
midsouthsoccer - that's only true when he is playing school sports but not true if he plays any sport competitively - travel/club soccer, baseball, football, etc.
From what I have read recently, studies are (at least in respect of academic achievements) showing that it may not be advantageous: Not saying that these studies are gospel, but certainly goes against what I would think would be common sense logic. Then again, what the article posits as a reason is also logical: