No doubt, the selection process varies

from club to club and players are chosen or assigned to teams according to club philosophy. When players are evaluated for region-level representation or higher, the coaches usually have an evaluation tool to guide those evaluating players asking for opinions about technical elements (e.g., comfort with the ball, finishing, creativity), tactical elements (e.g., ball circulation, communication, positional check details awareness), and physical/psychological elements (e.g., competitive attitude, soccer speed, soccer fitness, work rate) (Sam Snow, US Youth Soccer; personal communication); player size is not a stated factor. The assumption is that if a coach has to choose between two players, the choice will usually favor the taller and/or heavier player. There are a number of excellent studies that demonstrate the small degrees of difference in the various factors of fitness between players born early vs. late in the birth year 3, 20, 22, 23, 28, 29, 30,

31 and 32 and that those born later in the birth year who continually fail to get selected drop out of sport more often than those born early in the year. 22 and 33 None address the assumption that teams of players born earlier in the birth year actually perform better than teams made up of players born later in the birth year. Combining a database of birth month and year with the season ending records provided a look at whether that assumption PAK inhibitor actually resulted in a better record. From Table 3, it is obvious that simply having a team populated with players born earlier in the birth year is no guarantee of having a successful season as evidenced by the lack of a correlation between average team birth date vs. winning percentages and scoring. The lack of any discernable pattern would seem to indicate there is no systematic benefit of having a team of early maturing players. There were the occasional correlations between team age and some team performance (Table 3). Only for the U11 (1999) was there the appearance of a systematic impact of team age on outcome. This alone Parvulin is curious because most reports indicate that the

RAE is most evident around puberty, older than this age group. Of the significant correlations, probably the one of most interest or importance for any age group would be with the points per game. The variance in outcome accounted for by knowing a team’s age (r2) ranges from 0.04% to 14.4% in the boys and from 0.01% to 5.3% in the girls. Anderson and Sally 34 analyzed numerous factors that might influence outcome in professional league play and concluded that random chance accounts for half the information about match outcome making most any influence of team age on match outcome a minor factor. Based on the overall data, for each 30-day increase in mean team age, a team might gain 0.16 (5%) out of a possible 3 points per match. Overall, an RAE was present across all ages in both male and female teams.