Abstract

One consistently reported influence on athlete development is relative age (i.e., one’s age compared to others in a cohort). Relative age effects are grounded in the notion that sport selection systems choose athletes based on maturational characteristics and that once chosen, these athletes are placed in superior developmental environments. The purpose of this study was to confirm a relative age effect in a sample of 211 representative male ice-hockey players and determine whether participants in the different age quartiles were distinguishable by two factors thought to be responsible for perpetuating relative age effects in sport: their level of physical maturation (reflected by height and weight values) and/or in-game exposure (as reflected by actual playing time measured at a representative sample of games). Results indicated that a significantly greater proportion of players were selected from early in the year but, there was little variability among participants for the other dependent variables. These results suggest that elite youth sport coaches may select athletes who do not differ in body type and that once selected for the elite representative team athletes have comparable experiences. Verf.-Referat