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Comment by smoyer | Hacker News Reader

The youth sports discontinuity was a problem for me when I became old enough to play little league, but was exploited by me when I should have moved on to Teener League.

I was born on the cut-off date for Little League, so I was the youngest player on the team my first year (and the youngest for my grade the other years.) Do to ambiguity in how the cut-off date wording was written, I ended up (legally) playing a fourth year when I was 13. I was never a big kid but at this point I was certainly bigger than all the 10 year-olds and more importantly had gained coordination and experience. It was my favorite year playing baseball.

(As an aside, I paid karma for it the next year ... I spent eighth grade in a city Teener League where I was once again the smallest, least experienced kid. And the city league was way more cut-throat than what I'd experienced in the suburban setting my previous four years.)

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I was always small until about age 16, and I always sucked at sports and never really got into them - partly as a result.

I wonder if we shouldn't group kids by size for sporting activities instead of by age.

There's a famous statistic in Canada that NHL players are much more likely to be born in January and February than September-December. The reason being is they were nearly a year older than other kids they were paired with, so they did better at the sport and thus kept it up as they grew.

Seems silly.

>I wonder if we shouldn't group kids by size for sporting activities instead of by age.

Depending on how small your buckets are, you may end up with a scarcity problem (players and admins/coaches). Also, age matters a lot in regards to coordination. A 13 year old who is roughly the size as a ten year old will, on average, have a large advantage.

Some people just aren't cut out for athletics genetically. Some grow later on and may or may not be interested. Age seems like a fair sorting criteria and general enough to not introduce too much complexity.

> A 13 year old who is roughly the size as a ten year old will, on average, have a large advantage.

This is an interesting claim. How much is a large advantage? Do you mean in hockey specifically? Or in athletics? Or any given task?

> Some people just aren't cut out for athletics genetically. Some grow later on and may or may not be interested. Age seems like a fair sorting criteria and general enough to not introduce too much complexity.

Age isn't particularly fair but it isn't the worst either. As a kid, being around kids younger than you can be really displeasing. When you're a kid, the only thing you want is to be treated like you're older/better than you are. If you keep getting put on teams for people who are small - it's likely you're being put on teams for people who are smaller than you.

I had to play baseball with 7-yr olds for about 3 years. It wore me down as a kid. I gave up on baseball at that point and said I wasn't doing it anymore. The reason I had to play with them is because no coach wanted me on their team because they saw me as too small. (Small town, they didn't group by age as much as they did by size) I'd see kids go up to bigger-kid teams and get bigger but I stayed the same size.

As a kid - it was super disheartening to be stuck with the same 7 to 8 year olds for all that time and seeing people you used to play with in the bigger kid league. It sucked.

That said - baseball is probably the ONLY sport I can imagine being where you could move kids up by age and not by size as much. Football, soccer, basketball, etc. all involve a serious size component to them whereas baseball is less so - in my mind.

For reference - I grew up to be a normal sized adult. I was just super late on the curve compared to my peers.

When I was a kid, our club soccer travel team of 4th graders beat an intramural team of 6th graders by 3 goals. Our coach lost $100, because he'd bet we'd win by at least 4. I think soccer and basketball much moreso involve a coordination and fitness component than size. In youth soccer, you have to outrun the other kids and handle the ball well. Messi is 5'7". In basketball, of course, height does help a lot there, but amongst local kids, better to be able to make shots, dribble, and get around the court.

Football was the only sport that segregated by size in my school system's leagues, in middle school. Well, besides wrestling, of course. They're contact sports.

> The reason being is they were nearly a year older than other kids they were paired with.

I’m amused that the kids who did worse are absolutely necessary for the kids who do better. They end up getting wasted by the process, demotivated, but they are a necessary brick to step upon.

It’s the same consideration when talking about male suicide. Are they necessary for others to feel good? We could solve a good part of it as a society, but at the expense of providing an environment where males fail less, have a better social net, receive more love, and are less pushed to succeed in their career to be recognized. So we could solve it, but it may cost our economic growth. Is that why male suicide isn’t getting solved? It’s getting less funding than even dog shelters, and less attention than much smaller problems.

It’s the same consideration when talking about male suicide. Are they necessary for others to feel good?

No.

There's no evidence at all to support this view. In fact there is evidence to support the view that people who feel good when others feel bad are more likely to have suicidal tendencies.

Then... why don’t we act against it? Isn’t it, then, more urgent than other topics? It doesn’t seem like we care, given we always treat male complaints as crybabies.

> I wonder if we shouldn't group kids by size for sporting activities instead of by age.

This is how it's done in rugby in New Zealand and maybe a few other countries, but not most. It's much more important in rugby than in baseball!

I had the exact same experience. I was one of the youngest people in my year and one of the worst players on my team. Until my age 13 season, when they wouldn't let me move up into the teenager league because of a one=month difference in age. So I was pitching to kids who had just turned 10 ... I threw a lot of strikeouts that year and hit my only home run ever haha.

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