Biological vs Chronological Age and Fairness

Age is a common argument in youth basketball and especially AAU. People complain about grade holdbacks or redshirting for athletic purposes, which is not particularly new, as I knew parents holding back their boys over 20 years ago. There is also debate about the proper age group for freshmen who played varsity: Should they play U16 with their age group or U18 with varsity players? The underlying theme of these actions and conversations is winning, and especially a perceived fairness to enable winning. A second theme is making things harder for players, as we believe only through the struggle will players improve.

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Another common discussion is the rate at which children quit sports, as Tom Farrey, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program, said his organization has found children quit sports, on average, at age 12. Everyone has an opinion on the reasons for children quitting, and especially at this age. We blame coach negativity, overly serious games, early specialization, and more. Everyone has a pet issue on which to place the blame.

A baseball coach made an interesting point. He quit baseball after Little League All-Stars because he was moving to the bigger fields. He was small, likely a late maturer, and the bigger fields “made sport thoroughly unenjoyable.” He sat out three years and returned in high school.

Basketball players in FIBA transition out of Mini-Basket at 12 years of age: The court gets bigger and players move from four-vs-four to five-vs-five. The game gets harder and more complex. Of course, basketball in the United States is governed by different, often inconsistent rules. However, does the transition to a higher basket height, bigger court, and full five-vs-five influence children, especially the smaller or late maturers, to quit because their bodies are not ready for the new game?

We base most things on averages. We move to the bigger field at age 13 because, on average, most have outgrown the smaller fields, and the smaller field probably is dangerous for those playing against the most advanced 13-year-olds. We look at the positive tail — the biggest, strongest, most mature — from a safety standpoint, but primarily for the majority in the middle. We ignore the negative tail — the smallest and least mature. They drop out, and most see this as the natural selection process, the pyramid getting smaller as the game gets more competitive. The players who are not as good or prepared or big drop out. Normal. Nothing to see here. People generally continue with the things they are good at and quit when they are not. No need to study the phenomenon in more depth.

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We use chronological ages because of the ease of measurement. Everyone has a birth certificate. You were born on a specific date, you have proof of that date, and that makes you a certain age. We imagine everyone of the same birth year to be roughly the same, although we know this is inaccurate. I was the oldest player on my 5th grade basketball team, I believe, and probably the second or third tallest at around 5’4 (I think). We played against a player who was 6’2 and looked 10 years older than us in our very first competitive basketball game. He was the same height and looked virtually the same when he graduated from high school. We were the same age, but definitely not the same in terms of physical maturation.

Designating us into the same competition category is much easier than exploring alternatives. We do not see these physical discrepancies as unfair because our birth year is unassailable. We do not question the randomness of birth dates. If nobody tracked birth dates — we were born, and left the hospital with no birth certificates and records did not exist — would we be placed in the same competition category? Would the undersized 13-year-old baseball player have to choose between playing on a field that is too big or quitting?

I wrote about bio-banding two years ago and have found myself referencing the article several times recently as people describe irascible problems in youth sports. We avoid potential solutions such as bio-banding or simple common sense because we assume the motives are to gain advantages to win. Our obsession with fair leads to more unfairness.

If the Little League had told the small 13-year-old to stay in majors rather then moving to the bigger fields in senior minors (that’s what it was called in my Little League), other parents and coaches would complain. My dad was my Little League coach in majors. Majors was a two-year age group. When we moved to majors, we must have retained more players than usual because our league had to add an expansion team. My dad reluctantly volunteered when nobody else wanted to coach the new team. Other teams had roughly half the roster held over from the previous season, but we were a whole new team.

At the draft, somewhere in the middle rounds, the best team selected one of my school friends, (JD) just before my dad planned to pick him. In the next round or so, my dad chose another player (JH) of similar position. After the draft, the other coach asked about acquiring JH because his best friend was the assistant coach’s son. My dad suggested a JD for JH trade. Friend for friend, third baseman for shortstop, slightly bigger for slightly faster. The other coach refused because he knew JD was better. Neither player made the all-star team in either of our seasons in majors. JD was better, but the difference between the two was not going to disrupt the standings, but the Little League coach could not take that chance.

That was two coaches talking about swapping players to play with their school friends. Imagine instead the Little League All-Star (LLAS) was left behind because he was deemed too small for the senior minor fields, despite being an all-star in majors. The other teams would not accept an All-Star playing below his birth year. Every team would complain. The player would be accused of cheating and sandbagging to win Little League championships. Instead, he quit.

A common sense solution to retain a player — allowing him to play with players of a similar size for another year — is unusable because adults are so concerned about cheating and allusions of fairness. We care about birthdates and chronological age, but not maturation and biological age. We do not see the advantages of early maturers as unfair — that’s just biology — but complain vociferously when a player plays down an age group based on birthdates.

On the playground, with no adults, nobody would have a problem if the player played on a smaller field. Nobody would check his birth certificate and argue he was two months too old to play on their field. Children do not look at ages when creating fair teams. They match up by size and perceived talent. At our recess basketball games, we always split our top four players so two were on each team. We never stacked a team with three. We tried to create fair teams, not by using birthdates and ages, but size and skill. Children intuitively understand fair. As someone tweeted during the World Cup, “Mbappé and Olise are the two players you’d split up to make the teams when we were kids.” Adults only use fair as an argument to retain their child’s advantage.

When I coached in Estonia, the oldest age group was U18, but boys graduated from high school as 18 year olds or U19s. Better players played on adult teams as high-school seniors or they quit after U18. We had an awkward 6’4/6’5 18 year-old who was not good enough to play for our men’s teams. The club simply had too many players, as the professional team sent down players to play on the amateur men’s teams. However, he had one year of high school left; he did not want to move to a new city, and the other semipro team in our city had no youth program after U16. There was nowhere for him to play.

The Federation instituted a rule for players like him. An 18-year-old with no men’s team opportunities in his club can play U18, provided he registers as an U18 player and does not play any senior (adult) games. As an example, most of our other U18 players also played on the men’s amateur teams. You could play down as an 18-year-old, but not if you appeared in men’s games. The Federation provided a common sense solution for players trapped in a difficult situation by the groups, knowing nobody would sandbag to play U18 when they had opportunities to play senior basketball.

The same idea would be like allowing a senior to play junior varsity rather than cutting him. Most people do not see the point, but also complain about high schools no longer having enough players for multiple teams. The senior would be allowed to play JV, but he could not play varsity also, whereas in most states, a freshman can move back and forth between JV and varsity.

Popular sentiment would be against a senior playing JV. It would be unfair to the other JV teams who might lose one more game; of course, we are talking about a senior who is not good enough to play a single varsity minute. Is he likely to change the competitive landscape of a JV league? Others see the senior playing JV as taking away someone else’s opportunities. Why do we rate one opportunity over another?

There was a player a year behind me in high school who was cut from the basketball team every year: Freshmen team, JV team, varsity team twice. Despite never making a high-school team, he kept practicing. He played all the time, lifted weights, and ran track and cross country. He was always on the small side. By junior year, he was starting to grow, and the weights were starting to show.

He went to a mid-major Division 1 program for college and tried out for the team. Almost unanimously, the players said he should have made the team. He outplayed the starting point guard at tryouts, but the coach decided not to keep any walk-ons.

He came close. His story likely is an outlier. Few players persist after being cut so many times. Ultimately, there is no Hollywood ending. However, what if he could have played JV as a junior or senior? Would one season of high-school competition have prepared him just enough to make the D1 as a walk-on? What if he had played on the freshmen team as a sophomore because he was the size of a freshman? Would the experience have been enough to make varsity as a junior as he started to grow and catch up to his classmates in size, maturity, and athleticism?

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We do not allow this because we deem it unfair to someone else. Why should he play on a freshmen team instead of a freshman? Of course, there were three freshmen on varsity when he was a junior. Is that unfair to him? We always accept, encourage and even insist on advanced players moving up to challenge themselves and play against better competition, but we are against older players playing down to play against equitable competition. Why is using chronological age fair, but using biological age unfair?

The reason likely is simply because birth certificates are the easiest measurement. Ages work for the majority or the middle, the 68% of the population that falls between -1 and +1 standard deviation (SD) from the mean. We are unconcerned with the negative tails (smaller, less mature, less experienced, less skilled), which may be where we see players quitting because they feel they are not good enough or not prepared for the bigger field or higher level of competition. It is not the competition or leagues and coaches being too competitive, but their perception of their abilities at more competitive levels.

I do not expect anything to change. However, as everyone seems upset about the number of children quitting sports around age 12 and overall declining participation in some sports at the high-school level, we should examine more creative modifications to enhance participation and facilitate the participation of the late maturers rather than simply blaming competition or specialization. There likely are many reasons, and perceived competence is shown repeatedly to be a major factor in continued physical activity. The answer to increase participation may be to re-think how we determine fair, and to work toward helping the late maturers or just the smaller children feel more competent and confident.