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Comment by peripitea | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of sports for which I find this still holds true. A lot of it comes down to how much the required skills to be great are around more innate skills (e.g. speed, height, jumping ability) vs acquirable skills (technique, flexibility, problem solving, mental fortitude). It's very hard to be a 95th percentile soccer, basketball, or track athlete without a decent amount of innate athleticism. But I've seen plenty of not-particularly-athletic people get to 95th percentile in things like climbing, grappling, long-distance running, etc.

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One of the big factors in outdoor sports is how you define participants. Advocacy groups are usually the ones who bother to do this, and they have a vested interest in making it look as big as possible (so as to better advocate for friendly policy). I think at one point the American Canoe Association defined a boater as anyone who had been in a canoe or kayak at least once within the past year.

Obviously if this is your universe of participants, it makes it a lot easier to get to 95%.

If you define it as anyone who spends time in a canoe or kayak at least once per week, in comparison, that 95% level of ability goes way way up.

> It's very hard to be a 95th percentile soccer, basketball, or track athlete without a decent amount of innate athleticism.

Completely not true.

Having absolute solid basics that you drill every single day (dribble with both hands or both feet, run your conditioning, shoot free throws, etc.) puts you in the 95th percentile until probably Division 1-A college level (at which point, yes, innate size and body type start to matter).

Yeah I could be wrong on basketball. I don't play it much but now that I think about it you can be a great shooter without being a great athlete, and that alone can make you quite valuable.

I was talking about all sports.

You have to have at least an average amount of athleticism for any sport.

After that, simply drilling the fundamentals over and over and over and over ad nauseam probably puts you into the 95th percentile. This also has the advantage that it improves your endurance and athleticism DRAMATICALLY.

There are regularly articles about middle school teams that are ferociously drilled on fundamentals beating significantly older and physically larger teams that don't have the fundamentals down cold.

I actually disagree in both directions. Have you played or coached many sports? I have, and I'm not trying to be an asshole with the question, but it just seems so clearly untrue to me that I wonder if you haven't or if we're somehow talking about different things. For some sports/positions, you can become 95th percentile even with below average athleticism, and for others it's essentially impossible even if you have average or even slightly-above-average athleticism. It's all on a spectrum depending on how reliant that sport or position is on innate vs trainable attributes.

Let me know if you disagree with any of these, or if you think the examples I'm choosing are not within the scope of your argument: -No matter how much you drill, you will never be a 95th percentile center in basketball if you're 5'8" or whatever the average male height is. -Slightly further down the innate vs. trainable spectrum, I have never seen an average athlete become even close to a 95th percentile sprinter, long jumper, football wide receiver, or soccer winger. Speed is too important for these, and speed is largely innate. -I have seen below-average athletes become 95th percentile power lifters, football linemen, archers, grapplers, climbers, long distance swimmers, etc. That's because these sports/positions depend on more trainable attributes like strength, flexibility, endurance, technique, and mental focus/resilience.

- No matter how much you drill, you will never be a 95th percentile center in basketball if you're 5'8" or whatever the average male height is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265197

- Slightly further down the innate vs. trainable spectrum, I have never seen an average athlete become even close to a 95th percentile sprinter, long jumper, football wide receiver, or soccer winger.

You're looking at this the wrong way. You're thinking about pro players. For most sports, if you're paid to play, you're probably in the top 1% or even 0.5%. Top 5% is much, much bigger and it's usually semi-pros and even amateurs. You can definitely be a half decent player in an amateur team for almost any sport, as long as you're not actually disabled. And even then, it depends on the disability.

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