Why are great athletes more likely to be younger siblings?

I'm the youngest of three boys. We were all D1 athletes. I'm the slowest by a pretty substantial margin.

However, I matured faster than my brothers and, having been able to observe them, picked up proper techniques and approaches to training earlier than they did. As a result, I broke many of their age-group records. Once I stopped growing, however, it came down to who had the most physical / mental talent (not me).

The other thing to mention is access to training. When I was in middle school, I was able to train with the high school team because my middle brother included me. I even got to go on the winter training trip to Florida with the high school team. That access to training with older kids who were bigger, faster and more mature accelerated my development both physically and mentally.

One of the studies found that only 5% of the athletes they studied were only children. That presumably means 95% of the athletes had siblings.

Using 1999 data [1], 52% of US families had no children, 20% had one child, 18% had two children, 7% had 3 children, and 3% had 4 or more children.

That means that of children who had siblings in 1999, at least 59% had at least one older sibling, and at most 41% were the oldest sibling. If position within multi-sibling families was independent of chances of becoming a great athlete, we would expect great athletes to be more likely to be younger siblings simply because there are more younger siblings.

If we toss only children athletes in with the oldest child athletes from multi-child families, it doesn't make much difference because with only 5% of athletes being only children there simply aren't enough to tip the balance. It only brings it down to 56% have at least one older sibling, 44% do not have an older sibling.

This suggests that a better question would be "Why are only children less likely to become great athletes?"

[1] https://aspe.hhs.gov/report/trends-well-being-americas-child...

One factor this article might miss is a pure fitness aspect. I had older siblings and a father who often coached their teams, and credited much of my fitness level in elementary school to having attempted to run laps with kids 6.5 years older than me when I was a toddler and kindergartener.

I have this situation with my daughters. My son, the youngest, isn't much interested in baseball yet.

I played baseball, not at a high level or anything special, but I played and loved it. Then I had kids, the first two girls, and I got them started with fastpitch softball. It took me awhile to get up to speed with what I'll call "modern training methods" - and did a lot of trial and, unfortunately, error with my oldest daughter.

I've coached both of them and I can say that when I started training my younger daughter how to hit, at age 6, I had about 4 years worth of modern training/coaching knowledge fresh in my head. My older kid, who started at 9, had a dad who kind of knew how it worked, but it was rusty.

So what I ended up with is an older daughter who became great, eventually, around 14u, but spent a lot of time on the bench and a lot of time spent re-learning how to correctly do things.

Then I have a 10 year old (at the moment) who was taught the correct way to do everything, from step 1.

Currently, the only objective results I can give you is that I had one kid who didn't make any teams for two entire seasons before making one because we attended 90% of their practices (open practices). Then I had another kid who has only not made one team in the last 2 years. This fall she made 4 out of 4 teams that she tried out for. She finally failed to make a team when we went over a large organization in Oklahoma that plays at an extremely high level, and they were only looking for 2 more players to complete their roster.

> The amount of informal play that athletes do may also be a predictor of who goes on to become elite. A study comparing soccer players who were offered scholarships from Premier League academies at age 16 with players who were released found that the two groups had accumulated a nearly identical number of hours in practice at their academies. But players offered scholarships had spent more than twice as much time per year on informal soccer play — games with family and friends in local streets and parks — than the players who were released. The NBA has also noted that informal play exposes children to more variables — like different roles and positions, court sizes and numbers of players — which can accelerate skill development, creating “smarter learners” used to adapting.

This seems like such a strange thing to conclude. It seems like this could be driven entirely by there being a much larger variation in the number of hours of informal practice than the number of hours in formal practice.

in the soccer community at least, it's well known that you have to move a kid up in age groups to accelerate development

I see this in wrestling all the time.

First off, the biggest influence would seem to be having a parent who is a coach or competed at a high level. I don't see how this would change by birth order as all the kids are likely wrestling before they walk.

For kids with parents new to the sport, I see a couple possible reasons. First and foremost I would say that having an bigger/stronger sibling to spar with benefits the younger child more than the other. I can also assure you that at least with wrestling, this happens throughout the day, anywhere in the house. Even for other sports, I can see this happening. Show up a bit early and pass the ball around, or warmup with techniques. The younger child will be be exposed to someone with slightly better technique on a regular basis.

The other factor I see is that the parents just have a better idea of how it works. Which tournaments/camps/clubs to sign up for outside the regular scholastic season.

Also, the younger sibling may just start earlier. You're already dragging them along to all the tournaments and clubs anyway, may as well sign them up, too. So they end up starting a couple years earlier.

One aspect that isn't mentioned that I think probably has a huge impact: money.

Not talking about whether the older siblings' career makes money that's used for the younger, although that might be the case as well. Instead, by the time the younger starts the parents probably have more of it. Given that for academic success money is a huge factor, I'd wager it's in sports as well.

Related:

> Recent research has consistently found that earlier born children score slightly higher on average on measures of intelligence, but has found zero, or almost zero, robust effect of birth order on personality.

(Wikipedia, citing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_order#cite_note-:0-2)

Is this only true for sports? My older brother has always acted as a kind of trailblazer for me (at school and in all aspects of life). I've been "drafting" behind him most of my life, so I wouldn't be surprised if I've had less stress overall and could therefore afford to take on even more one day..

This is easy you get to figure out what they know without their mistakes. My brother taught me to dribble, pass, shoot, tackle, and throw. I'm much better at them but he had to teach himself. He learn how to dribble left and right cause he saw how it hampered him to he forced me to learn. Its pretty standard to do that

I saw some of this when my son was in kid sports. A lot of the better soccer players had an older brother or sister.

This reminds me of children being intensively tutored by parents in some parental domain of exceptional expertise. They both illustrate developmental/educational environments having impacts dramatic. Any similar illustrations come to mind?

Looking ahead to edtech that is personalized collaborative remote mobile XR with human-AI hybrid NPCs, etc... there's a question of what should we be aiming for? What constitutes success? Is there potential for low-hanging "OMG!" fruit? If 80% of US high-school graduates were to achieve the science understanding of current Harvard entering freshman, would that be a stunning success, or an abject failure? Or both? Having a collection of "here's an illustration of really good outcomes" might help broaden vision and expectation.

I taught my older son to bike like all parents by breaking my back running along them. All stressed out he will die if he falls.

It took a week or so.

His younger brother learned in 15 minutes when we were on vacation because otherwise he woukd not have been able to play with him and some friends.

The key thing is that the older brother won't have much pity, either you follow or you don't.

I saw that in plenty other cases where the younger one had to learn fast, and he learned much quicker and earlier too.

Us being imperfect parents, he also watched some movies earlier than his brother did.

I find on my one data point analysis that the way children are raised are very different between siblings.

I've definitely noticed a sibling phenomenon among good fencers. A lot of the top fencers have siblings who also fence. To the point where I can name several sibling duos in the fencing community.

Could it also be that younger siblings get parents who are a little richer and gotten over the sticker shock of being a top athlete? A lot of top youth sports require an obscene amount of money to get to the top levels. Maybe by kid #2 the parents are okay with junior's sport costing them a few thousand a month.

The greatest female chess player of all time is Judit Polgar. Her two older sisters are a grandmaster and international master.

Huh, in my anecdotal experience the older sibling is always wayyyy better and i always attribute that to the first sibling being an only child and therefore developing more independent traits and learns to count on themselves which allows them to better excel.

As the article mentioned, parents being able to navigate the sport hierarchy, is very helpful.

As the youngest I can now eat the most food fastest.. I had to if I was to get any seconds

Counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Gretzky