Outliers

The trend towards early specialization in youth sports seems to be accelerating, despite strong evidence that it is not necessary to achieve elite athlete status. To separate fact from fiction, here are answers to three of the most frequently asked questions about early sport specialization.

Much has been made of the relative age effect (RAE) - that birth month is destiny for sports achievement - but the evidence is far from conclusive. It is true that some sports team rosters across the globe have a lot of players born in the first few months of the year, but there is more to this phenomenon than originally understood.