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By: Rudy Klancnik
Photography: Kristen Karlisch
Date Posted: 2/27/2009
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Outliers and Outfielders
Practice makes perfect — or does it? Serious youth athletes spend countless hours honing their skills on the field, while their parents juggle their lives to find the time to shuttle their kids to practices and tournaments. It all seemingly comes down to just that: in a word, time.
But what if one of the main factors of athletic success for your child is hinged on one time factor that parents have little control over: the time your child is born. Best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell suggests that a young athlete’s birthdate can mean the difference between a brilliant youth sports career and one spent in the shadows.
In his 2008 book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell questions why some people succeed — and he points to a child’s birthdate as an advantage, particularly for future athletes. Citing the roster of a Canadian junior hockey team (considered to be the most competitive grouping of teenage hockey talent in the galaxy), Gladwell notes that 17 of the 25 players were born in one of four months — January, February, March or April. Why is that important? Because, asserts Gladwell, it shows that these phenoms aren’t phenoms just because they splashed around in some superhuman gene pool. Instead, it suggests that because their birthdate just so happened to come right after hockey league registration, these players got up to an 11-month head start on other teammates and opponents.
Does this sound familiar? Starting around the age of 10, kids who have this head start prove to be the best and brightest in their field of play thanks to their advanced physical maturity. Parents and coaches take note. Then it begins … these players are encouraged to play in select leagues (or All-Stars or club or whatever the best league is called in your area). Here, they receive the best coaching, the best equipment, the best tournaments against the best competition and the most practice time. Is it any coincidence that by the time they’re in their late teens (the age they are scouted by collegiate coaches), these kids have an upper hand? Sure, they had to be skilled young players to advance this far, but the luck of a birthday truly set them up for later success.
Texas Christian University Division I women’s soccer head coach Dan Abdalla, like every collegiate soccer coach in the nation, understands how important club soccer is to recruiting. “We certainly visit high school soccer teams to check out a particular recruit, but at a good club tournament, we can look at a dozen kids in a couple of days. Club soccer, especially in the North Texas area, is a fantastic and very serious business.”
The birthdate advantage is something Abdalla takes seriously. “Do I think some parents hold their kids back to gain an athletic advantage down the road? Absolutely,” he says. “I’ve actually never looked at our roster to draw any conclusions about the line between birthdates and performance, but I’d imagine every collegiate team has its share of kids who dominated their club teams at early ages because of their early physical superiority.”
Many parents in the Fort Worth area have already committed to memory registration dates and how their young future star fits into that picture. Some of the more skeptical among us believe that every parent of a select athlete plans out some diabolical scheme when their kids are still in diapers to manipulate the system perfectly so their bundles of joy someday can win a Heisman. However, like many aspects of select sports, fact and fiction have a way of getting confused.
Should they stay or should they go? Many parents grapple with this question when it comes to athletics and academics. A 4-year-old with a June birthday could spend a year in pre-kindergarten and then be nearly a year older than many of his classmates in kindergarten. If you assume Gladwell’s theory and fast forward 10 years, this same child would have a better-than-average shot at excelling in the classroom and on the athletic fields. For parents, it’s no easy decision.
“[Our son’s] birthday allowed us to hold him back a year,” says Lisa Paltry, mom of a 12-year-old shortstop for a select baseball team in Southlake. “He’s always been more physically mature than most of the kids on his team. You can see the difference it’s made for his overall confidence and performance.”
Many parents, though, like Bob Sanders, contend that holding athletes back isn’t necessarily the best plan of action. “You know what, I could have held him back a year and he would have dominated his league, but I decided to let him play with the bigger kids, and he’s done just fine,” says Sanders, the parent of an 11-year-old second baseman for a select baseball league in Aledo.
Pepper Hastings, a vice president with the Flower Mound Youth Sports Association and the head of Flower Mound’s nationally respected select baseball organization, says, “You have to save a lot of folks from themselves. We can save coaches from practicing too often by closing the fields certain times of the year. Every 9-year-old kid doesn’t need a private pitching and hitting coach. What they really need is for their parent to spend 15 minutes a night playing catch with them.”
TCU’s Abdalla has produced a quality program in a short period of time in Fort Worth, highlighted by notching a school record for wins last season. But with only a handful of student-athletes on full scholarships, he knows the mounds of cash being paid for private instruction and tournament fees aren’t typically rewarded — financially, anyway.
“Parents in this area are so passionate about their kids, so invested in so many ways in their success,” Abdalla says. “But if they’re going into it assuming that a full scholarship is coming their way at the end, they’re mistaken about 99 percent of the time.”
Hastings agrees.
“There are pervasive myths about select baseball,” Hastings says. “Myth No. 1 is that your investment in private lessons will get paid back with a full ride to college or a Major League contract. Of course, 99.9 percent of the time, that’s not going to happen. Myth No. 2 is that you’re going to win a national championship. There aren’t any national championships. There are plenty of really good tournaments, but there’s not a national title trophy out there to claim.”
Regardless of what Outliers says about how select athletes often become successful, any story about select sports begins and ends with the parents. Whether they’re heroes or villains, parents write the story.
Hastings adds, “We’re here to prepare kids for the next level. You want to prepare each age group to take the next step. It’s not about winning, although that’s hard for many folks to hear. It’s about getting them ready for what’s next.”
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