Adam@Home by Rob Harrell for February 18, 2011

love it!

:-D too funny. Wonder if Gnomeo is among them.

In a no-contact league, being small probably is an advantage. Especially if you’re so short the bigger kids don’t notice you down there!

hey —- my son is small—– but very very fast —-

The great thing about hockey is how you can be a variety of body types and still succeed. If your small, but fast, you can actually be better than a 7’0” 270 lbs. player.

It’s not just size, though. Older kids, even if they’re simply the oldest in their age bracket, have better hand-to-eye coordination, reflexes, and other motor skills than the younger ones. In youth sports with arbitrary cut-off dates for age divisions, those with birthdays soon after the cut-off tend to outperform those born later, so they get more playing time and more coaching attention, which makes them more likely to continue in the sport as they get older. There are certainly plenty of exceptions, but even in some professional sports there are statistically significant clusters of players born at one time of the year over others.

When I was a kid, I was almost always among the youngest in my grade, but I was also among the biggest and tallest. And I was usually a real klutz when it came to sports, compared to classmates who were nearly a year older than me but also much smaller. (Of course, it could also be that I would have been klutzy no matter WHAT age group I was competing amongst…)

In the NHL, some of the bigger guys have gotten bad penalties because chest-high to them is head-high to normal-height guys.

@Lyle I think Fritzoid is right. One of the first pieces in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” was how most people in the NHL were born before July. Thus, they’re early development and size got them the attention of the coaches and set them up to succeed at a much higher probability than those whoe were born after summer.

I don’t remember reading “Outliers”, but I may have done (the title sounds familiar). I was thinking it was from “Freakonomics”, but wasn’t sure enough of it to cite my source. If I remember correctly, the NHL was the specific instance the author (whoever it was) used to illustrate the point…

In the old days before they shrunk the comics you’d be able to see the little fellers.

Funny one! LOL