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Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Matthew Effect Part 2

Mulling over the Matthew Effect


In response to the post, we received some really interesting and thoughtful comments, which you can read at the original article. I tried to respond to those comments, but it's worthwhile mulling over a few of the points raised. In particular, the big question is: Given this effect, and the fact that children born in later months are seemingly disadvantaged by their younger relative age, what should be done to ensure maximum talent "delivery" at the senior level?


It's important to note that by the time the national coach, or the head coach of a profession team makes his/her picks, it's already too late. The damage has been done, many years earlier. Similarly, a sports scientist who is doing talent ID assessments for a high performance programme at say Olympic level cannot be concerned with month of birth - their job is simply to pull out those people who display talent or ability to perform better than others. The problem is, most of those they pull out will have been born early in the year, thanks to a decision made many years earlier. The question is what one should do to ensure that up to half the population remain eligible for success for as long as possible?

A split in age-groupings?

And that is a question I was thinking about a great deal today, and must confess that no easy solution presents itself. In his book, Gladwell suggests the creation of a "split" in the age groupings, so that children born in the first half of the year compete in a separate league structure to those born in the second half. I'm not sure about ice-hockey (which is the example he uses), but this idea would be very difficult to implement for most other sports. For one thing, it would require twice the coaching time and expertise and would more than double some of the resources required for the participation of athletes in sport.

That is, the entire basis for the Matthew effect is that younger players who happen to be older by virtue of their earlier birth month are given superior coaching, competition and opportunity. The creation of a second, separate league for those born later in the year would not solve this problem, unless the quality of coaching provided to that second group of children was at least comparable. In SA, there are barely enough decent coaches for one team, let alone two, so I'm not convinced this would work. And that's apart from the administrative problem raised by Gladwell in his book.

Weight categories?





Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. Skills develop according to the situation presented to the player, and so a more all-round skill set would be the result if age-categories were adhered to, since no size advantage would exist for one player to easily dominate another physically. Late maturers would be rewarded, because they would develop skills that one would usually be found in the smaller, more nible players, and when they eventually "fill out" and bulk up, they'd carry through those skills, and remain skillful as "big men".

On the other hand, do you really want a team with all-round skills and reduced specialist ability? Once you reach the professional level, the very specific demands of playing each position would quickly expose weaknesses that have developed as a result of the lack of necessity to develop those skills earlier. It's a debatable one, for sure. It has been tried, that much I know - I believe that they tried weight groupings (mixed with age groupings) in Australia. I haven't had the chance to investigate that more thoroughly, so I'm open to input on that one.

Changing the focus of performance



The incentive (and the wisdom) of the coach is therefore the first element - they should not be driven to win. Unfortunately, in many sports, this is an unrealistic goal, and one can understand how coaches pick better players at such young ages - they are under pressure to perform. So the collective mindset of the team, the parents, the school and the club often must change before this happens.

Once it does, then the priority of the coach can become skill development, enjoyment and development of attributes where size, strength and speed are not solely responsible for performance. This will never completely remove the effect, but education, a change in mindset and a different set of priorities might go a long way to "rescuing" those younger players who are so quickly lost from the system. Ironically enough, this focus on play rather than performance at a young age is likely to help performance at an older age, through the creation of a larger body of "eligible" players.

An impossible puzzle to solve, I suspect. As I said, I'm actually going to be suggesting to a few sports federations here in SA that they look long and hard at this very phenomenon, and try to understand how young talent moves through the system. Part of this will be discovering where these "early developers" go, what happens to late developers, and what strategies might be effective in maximizing the available player pool. So we have the possiblity of a real-life "case-study" or two, and I hope to be able to report on that soon!



Anonymous said...

Hi Ross
Considering what Gladwell has said, and the popularity of his book, don't you think there's a danger of parents with kids born later than April pushing those kids to complete their 10 000 hours too soon?
Seriously, how do we know how much sport is appropriate for our children, based on their age - assuming they love sport and are enthusiastically signing up for everything on offer?
Ann Brown