Problems with Talent Identification

Last week, on socalhoops, people argued the merits and disadvantages of age hold backs. Some posters felt that the age hold backs helped the age appropriate kids because the age appropriate kids play against tougher competition.

Theoretically, this is correct. When I was young, my parents lied about my age so I could attend a good basketball camp and play against older players. However, this gave me an advantage only when I returned to play against players my own age. Against the older kids, I did okay, but I certainly did not have an advantage.

This theory breaks down because of the way we evaluate and identify talent. When players try-out for the sponsored AAU team, and 11-year-olds compete against 10-year-olds for a spot on an u-11 AAU team, the 11-year-olds have a huge advantage because of the year of maturity. There is a big differece between a 10 and an 11-year-old in size, strength and maturity. Once a player makes a select team, he gets more practice time, better coaches (theoretically) and more opportunities (private training, better competition, etc.).

This is the subject of Chapter 1 in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. I have written frequently about our inability to evaluate and identify talent and the traits and characteristics which truly determine talent, whether for young players or when hiring coaches.

Gladwell writes about Canadian junior hockey players. He starts by writing:

If you have ability, the vast network of hockey scouts and talent spotters [AAU coaches and grassroots organizers] will find you, and if you are willing to work to develop that ability, the system will reward you.

We believe this to be true. The best and most talented players develop into the elite performers at the next level. We invest in this idea that you can identify superior talents at an early age, which is why we now rate 4th graders. However, Gladwell challenges this belief. A Canadian psychologist discovered that “in any elite group of Canadian hockey players, 40 percent of the players will have been born in January, February and March.” I have seen similar studies on baseball players in the USA. Is it a fluke? No, it’s age and maturity.

The cut-off date for junior hockey leagues in January 1. Therefore, a kid born in early January competes against a kid born in December who is almost one year younger. When I was young, I was one of the youngest players on my soccer teams; I think the cut-off was January 1 and I was a late September birthday. I always played on teams with kids who were a grade ahead of me in school who had birthdays in January and February. I remember playing with two friends in my class with November birthdays. But, in general, I was one of the younger players. However, in baseball, I think the cut-off date was August or September because I was always one of the older players. At younger ages, I performed better in baseball than soccer. I played all-stars in baseball, but I was never a very good soccer player. However, one of my friends in my class with a February birthday played select and competitive soccer. I always thought we were about the same in ability when we played at school. But, he competed against kids in an age group where he was one of the oldest kids, while I was in an age group where I was one of the youngest. Even though we had similar ability, he had that advantage in soccer, while I had a similar advantage in baseball. When coaches choose the select or all-star teams, “they are more likely to view as talented the bigger and more coordinated players who have the benefit of critical extra months of maturity,” (Gladwell).

The advantage, at the beginning, is small. At younger ages, like I said, we were about the same ability. However, by high school, my friend was clearly a better soccer player than me:

In the beginning, his advantage isn’t so much that he is inherently better but only that he is a little older. But by the age of 13 or 14, with the benefit of better coaching and all the extra practice under his belt, he really is better, so he’s the one more likely to make it.

I wrote about this in regards to player rankings, as it creates the self-fulfilling prophecy, which sociologist Robert Merton defined as a situation where “a false definition, in the beginning…evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.” When someone rates 4th graders, he does not identify talent – he identifies the players with early birth dates (or grade hold backs) who are more mature, taller, stronger and more coordinated. I wrote previously in Cross Over about such a player with a January birthday who matured early and made a “sponsored” team as a post player even though his dad was 5′8. In 5th grade, the kid was nearly full grown, so he had a definite advantage. When players get rated and make the “sponsored” teams, they have advantages like personal training and more gym time for practice and money to attend national tournaments. These advantages give the chosen few an advantage as they develop and the small advantage of age expands as the players receive more and better coaching (fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, basketball’s age advantage is less pronounced because of its entrepreneurial nature – there is no guarantee that a “sponsored” team receives better coaching, and often the opposite is true, as the sponsored teams feature shoe reps rather than dedicate coached).

Barnsley [the Canadian psychologist] argues that these kinds of skewed age distributions exist whenever three things happen: selection, streaming and differentiated experience. if you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the “talented” from the “untalented;” and if you provide the “talented” with  superior experience, then you’re going to end up giving a huge advantage to the small group of people born closest to the cut-off date.

In Outliers, Gladwell looks at the Canadian junior hockey team and the Czech soccer team. He writes that at any national team try-out, those born more than six months after the cut-off date should not even bother at the try-outs.

Those born in the last half of the year have all been discouraged, or overlooked, or pushed out of the sport. The talent of essentially half of the Czech athletic population has been squandered.

I wrote about point guards and personality over the summer and hypothesized that potential point guards are overlooked because at young ages, coaches select the more mature, more aggressive players (older players) rather than selecting for the talents and characteristics of good point guard play. While it does not preclude a point guard from being born early in the year (Nash was born in February),  when basketball coaches select for talent, the attributes they choose are not those synonymous with point guard play, even though many of the players chosen at early ages are ones who dribble well. As players develop, the bigger, stronger players dominate the ball, which enhances their development and reduces the development of a potential facilitator.

Gladwell’s study in Chapter 1 illustrates that we have a poor understanding of the road to success or excellence, and without a better understanding, our ability to evaluate and identify talent diminishes. When ranking players, choosing teams or identifying prospects, we need to look deeper than size, speed and strength, as those characteristics tend to balance as players continue to develop and all the players go through puberty. However, other talents do not necessarily balance out as players grow (like the personality of a facilitator), and players’ skills do not develop equally. What we see as success at an early age is often not success, but age. Rather than choose and develop the older players, we need a system by which we identify true talents or we need to wait to identify “talent” and differentiate training until the advantages of maturity disappear.