A little while ago I wrote about the relative age effect (RAE) in hockey and I thought I’d take another quick look at it. I think at an organizational level, it’s something that those hoping to grow the game should take a good look at. From a development perspective, we’re leaving a lot of kids behind and not because of a lack of skill on their part, but a technicallity that we have chosen not to deal with.
Relative Age Effect
As a quick refresher, the RAE is the under-representation in elite level hockey of players born in the last quarter of the year and an over-representation of players born in the first quarter of the year.
This difference is attributed to the developmental advantage those born earlier in the year get at younger age groups. Being nearly a full year older than some of their peers competing for the same spots on elite teams, these first quartile players typically are bigger, more coordinated, and are mentally more mature. Once selected to elite level teams, these players continue separating themselves from those not on elite teams through better coaching and more development opportunities gained in training and competing at a higher level.
2013 World Juniors
I thought it would be interesting to look at the 2013 IIHF Under-20 World Championships and see if the RAE was a factor in team selection at the top junior level. I pulled each of the ten competing team’s rosters from the official tournament site (http://www.worldjunior2013.com) and grabbed the birth months of all 23 players listed for each of the teams. Next, I categorized the birth months into quartiles (Q1:Jan-Mar, Q2:Apr-Jun, Q3:Jul-Sep, Q4:Oct-Dec) and put together the graph below showing both individual teams and the total across all teams.
Looking across all players in the tournament, the RAE is evident. First quartile players account for more than 36% while fourth quartile players contribute just about 15%. So things haven’t really changed since the 1980’s when the RAE was first documented.
There does seem to be some interesting things going on with the individual team data. While seven of the teams follow the expected pattern of fourth quartile born players being fewest, three teams; Czech Republic, Germany, and Latvia, do not. Since this is a small sample size, it could just be something unique to this year’s teams. Looking back over the last several U20 world championships will be the next step to see if this is typical of these countries.
Other, more interesting things could be going on with these countries. I’m assuming that since the IIHF uses a 31 Dec cutoff date for this tournament, as does Canada and the US for their youth hockey programs, that so do all the other participating countries. This may not be the case and would affect the RAE. Please post in the comments if you know that any of the participating countries use a different cutoff for their youth hockey.
The number of hockey players within a country may also factor into the RAE. If a country has a small number of hockey participants in youth hockey, organizing teams by a single birth year may be challenging and having two or maybe even three birth years playing on a single team may be the only way to have enough players to fill teams. At this time this is just speculation but it’s something worth looking at.
For now it seems that the RAE is something that is part of the game. Is there something that can be done to limit its impact on the development of hockey players? Some organizations in other sports have started rotating the cutoff date so that it’s not always the same group of athletes that are the youngest on the team. What do you think of this idea? Can it work? If you have any ideas, please share them with me in the comments.
Yours in hockey,
John
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