Size matters more
"Boy banned from hockey tourney for being too big
An eight-year-old hockey player has been banned from a Quebec tournament for being "bigger and stronger" than his other competitors.
Jared Murray, grand-nephew of Ottawa Senators coach Bryan Murray, is a four-foot-nine, 110-pound Grade 3 student registered as a novice B player with the Shawville Blackhawks..."
Boy banned from hockey tourney for being too bigBut actually when you think about it, it's perfectly fair. What's unfair is lumping players of vastly different size and ability in the same competition together based solely on their age.An eight-year-old hockey player has been banned from a Quebec tournament for being "bigger and stronger" than his other competitors.
Jared Murray, grand-nephew of Ottawa Senators coach Bryan Murray, is a four-foot-nine, 110-pound Grade 3 student registered as a novice B player with the Shawville Blackhawks.
His team was 11-3-2 during the season, finishing fourth in the standings, and Murray recorded a staggering 51 goals in 17 games.
But Hockey Outaouais officials have ruled that he is ineligible to play in the regional playdown tournament because of his size and strength.
Maybe I'm biased -- as a December baby, I was usually one of the smaller players on my team -- but the age-class system of eligibility never made much sense to me. It's clearly intended to be a proxy for size -- the primary factor, besides ability, in determining players' competitive standing relative to one another. And, equally clearly, it's an imperfect proxy. So why use the proxy, when its perfectly feasible to do without it? Why measure indirectly what can more easily be measured directly?
Why not group players by height and weight, in short, rather than age? That's the way it's done in some other sports, like boxing, wrestling, and rowing. Why not hockey?
4/02/2007
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The only concern I can come up with has to do with the social aspect of it. Children don't necessarily relate as well to others who are a few years younger or older than themselves. The salience of this point depends on what ends you think sports ought to promote. If competitiveness is the goal, then age isn't important. But if social concerns are at least as important, then I think it's a more complex question.
I agree with you, AC. The boy's skill level is obviously far beyond his age group. When I was a youngster, I was a real bad hockey player. (I mean bad in the old sense of the word.) We had a guy in our age group who was way above us in size, strength, and skill. It was impossible to play against him and we all resented him, unless he was on our team, of course. Our minor hockey association wisely moved him up a couple of age slots. He was too good for us.
He ended up playing some Junior A hockey (Lethbridge?? I think) but never made it beyond that. In school he was one of the guys, but on the ice he totally outclassed us.
It is a warped mentality that insists that we must keep kids together by age. It frustrates the skilled and bigger kid, and it makes all those kids he is whipping on the ice mad. It is much better for him to get the challenge he needs physically so that he can compete on his own level.
Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
david penner’s point is key, I don’t think anyone should be forced to play a sport with a group that is 3+ years older then them, especially when we‘re talking about a huge jump from something like age 7-12 or 10-14.
How is grouping players by age AND skill not preferable to physical size. Regardless of what side you come down on, it’s obviously unfair to make a ruling like that at the end of a season. Considering novice “B” was mentioned in the article, it would seem the league should have intervened after the 3rd or 4th game and moved the player up to a higher skill class. It is very common practice to move players to a higher skill class in novice and atom hockey based on dominance after the first few weeks of a season.
As I’m typing this, I’m looking at my Liftlock Atom tournament souvenir program. Among the kids playing in the tourney that year were Vincent Lecalvier, Mike Fisher, and Brian Gionta. Today the New Jersey Devils list Gionta as being 5-9, 175 pounds, small for a sixteen year-old hockey player! Imagine if as a kid he only played with other small players, his numbers would have been far uglier than the example in your news story. Luckily for the rest of us that year, we never saw any of those guys, they played each other because the 100 teams were split by skill.
When we’re talking about kids, and with the exception of rowing which I’m not familiar with, boxing and wrestling are actually closer to the hockey model. Kids taking up those sports, are still grouped by age, but also size and skill.
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On a side note, a December birthday was a lucky gift for my fellow high school athletes in the mid-90’s, as the age cut-offs were in (and still are?) October. You would have had the chance to play football against grade 9-10 players when you were in grade 11. These things tend to balance themselves out from childhood to young adulthood.
What David Penner and Alex said.
There were other ways to handle this. Stick him on defense for a period. Make him play goal for a period. Let him play a bit less than the other kids. Or, just let him play. Even WITH the kid, the team only finished fourth in the league. Sounds like perhaps the league had already compensated by putting him on a team with weaker players.
"In a show of support, the entire Shawville, Que. association has pulled its seven other teams and about 130 players from the tournament."
Completely idiotic - ruin the fun for everyone. Regardless of everyone's opinion, I don't see how pulling out of the tourney benefits anyone. The child in questions has 51 goals this season, so it's not like he's not had his fair share of fun.
Age is probably the easiest discriminator to administer; its the quickest cut, easy, low cost, universally understood; leave it to the coaches to juggle the line-up accordingly.
Educators have speculated on the benefits of blending age-groups in schools, at least to round out maturity ranges; rather than age/grade, discriminate on IQ, etc. Blended age groups are more like real-life.
Why bother mentioning that the boy scored 51 goals in 17 games? And banning him because of his size and strength? Sounds to me like the boy was banned for being better than everyone else. Might as well ban someone because of speed and agility. You're right, though. We wouldn't want our kids to be exposed to better competition. They might get better.
There are many sports in which skills develop over many years, and so age can also serve as a proxy for "years of experience".
But with so many dimensions, how is one less arbitrary than another? Are there enough undersize nine-year-olds with, say, more than 300 hours of hockey to match them against the oversize seven-year-olds with 500 hours of experience?
Yet the problem is not with the setting of arbitrary cleavages among groups of players. The problem is with changing them so late and so arbitrarily. If there were a rule about a player's weight or size, surely we would have heard the rule published. Instead, we have reports than an organizer decided that a player was "too big" or "too good", or some combination of the two.
Would the organizer similarly isolate a player who was deemed "too unskilled" or "too small" to play in that tournament, and refuse to allow that player to be part of a team?
When the rules are codified, their merits can be debated. When they are arbitrary, the debate takes on a very different tone.
I have been involved in minor sports my whole life as either a player or a coach, and I always find it unfortunate when a kid gets targeted like this due to his size. Age actually is the best, and usually the only, way to sort the kids, as it keeps kids together with peers who share their maturity level, motor development, etc. Size can actually be terribly deceiving at the younger age groups -- a 117 pound 8 year old is vastly different from a 117 pound 12 year old based on strength, quickness, and understanding of the game. They make look the same in pads, but they couldn't be more different. You have to approach each age group differently, and you just can't coach an 8 or 9 year old in the same way as you coach a 12 year old. They are completely different animals, trust me.
The real issue here isn't the kid's size, but rather the division in which he plays. He is playing in the "B" division and dominating -- put him in Novice "A", and the speed and skill of the kids his same age, but in that higher skill bracket, would neutralize his size advantages pretty quickly. This whole battle, near as I can tell, isn't about the kid so much as the fact that Shawville insists on registering their teams in the B division, while the league wants them in A.
with the exception of the anonymous posts, AC and others are proving that geeks shouldn't be allowed to run organized sports. Please do everyone a favour and just keep clapping from the stands.
To the assertion by Anon that the league wants the team in "A", the evidence in the media is to the contrary: team spokespeople are on record that the league formed no such opinion, and if the league had formed such an opinion then the team would have been placed into "A" division.
The suggestion (I take your word for it) that the league accepted the team's registration in the "B" division is strong evidence that the league was always content with that level of competition for the team. If the league had become uncomfortable with the team's registration at a later date, they would have informed the team; I'm quite certain (without going into transcripts of the original news reports) that the team has alleged no such letter was produced.
I actually played in a bantam hockey tournament agaionst a teram from Shawville! That would have been in 1968 or 1969. My memories of all that are pretty fuzzy, but I'm certain that the parents were a lot less insane than they are now, perhaps since no hockey players of that era were millionaires. What I do remember is that games ended in scores like 11-10 or 9-6 quite regularly. The prodigy mentioned in the story scored "51 goals in 17 games". That's an average of exactly three goals a game -- not IMO earth-shattering for minor hockey.
Ther are other factors here nobdy has mentioned--the opposing teams in this b division also have at least one player equal in size to Jared.Are they also banned?? No!
If Shawville moved to the A division as requested,they would have a lot more travelling to do. Gatineau area teams often cancel out of league games at different age levels when forced to travel out of their area to Ft Coulonge or even Shawville. This is a case of diecrimination--pure and simple.
I coach a atom team in Fort-Coulonge (mostly french )so Outaouais hockey did not pick out Shawville because it is an english town my opinion is Outaouais hockey do not want us small towns winning , two years ago our novice B team was told at the end of the season to move one of our star players (The smallest player on the team)we did not so Outaouais hockey put our B team in A for the regionals and playoffs we lost all games badly .This year again our Atom B team won 5 and tied one to start the year so again Outaouais hockey moved our team to A and we lost all games in A so Outaouais hockey is happy again so stop this language issue and look at the real reasons I opointed out above .Outaouais hockey has to let us go back to the ontario minor hockey leagues they sure don’t look like they want us in their city league