Dave your post may have been the 3 000 000 th hit on the site. Happened at about 21:53 MST.

I don't know that much about the PHV. I know of doctors checking the size of the growth plate and predicting how tall a player will be.

It is really hard to tell how big someone will end up to be. When D. Heatley was 14 he was small and not chosen in the Bantam draft. They looked at his dad who is about 5'8" and decided he would be undersized. His mom is tall with brothers in Germany about 6:5". Mason Raymond and Ryan Duncan were the smallest players on the 85ers team that is on about 5 videos in this site. Mason returned to community hockey first year bantam because they told him he would warm the bench most of the time in AAA. Ryan played on all of the elite teams. They both ended up playing jr. A and then on to NCAA. Mason grew to 6" and ended up with Vancouver and Ryan is 5'6" and even though he won the Hobey Baker he hasn't got a good shot yet. I know he is coming back from Europe to give it a try this year.

I am sure a lot of coaches know more about the PHV than I do. I know that you can't do a lot of plyo's when the growth plates are soft. I have had players that had to be in a cast and avoid any pounding during dramatic growth spurts.

I am interested to see the comments.
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Dave,

I am pretty excited about the thumb drive. It took me a long time to put it together and gather the material from 2 computers and a portable hard drive. I spent two days coding the videos so they are easy to find. I have one attached to each of my keychains and now any windows computer gives me access to the material even without the internet. I have spent a few thousand hours putting this material together, going to conferences, taking video all over the hockey world and I think it is the most complete source of info a coach could ever get.

I started this site because when I taught PE in the school system I would end up having to coach things I never participated in except for maybe a few activity classes or a seminar. ie. girl's gymnastics, wrestling, volleyball, basketball, badminton, track and field, cross country, etc. I would look for good resources because I wanted to do a good job. Info was all over the place and it is hard to understand books when you haven't played the sport. So I think videos are the key. I grew up playing football in the fall, hockey in the winter and baseball in the summer and of course dabbling in many things like tennis. I was luck enough to be able to play the highest level of baseball in Calgary at that time, college hockey and then play for a living (not great leagues but they paid me) in hockey and even played quarterback at my college spring football camp. So I have some knowledge of those three sports from lots of playing. Other sports I learn from study but it was hard to get good info that was easily accessible and that is what I have tried to do here. I wish I had the computer knowledge to put everything together like the programmer did on the pdf of Book 1 that is on the disk. It has music and you just click to go from section to section or print something.

Sorry for regressing and babbling here.

Anyway this ABC site has valuable material for coaches of all levels, both sexes, youth and pro and I hope it helps coaches with practice and understanding team play ideas.

Hi Dave,

Thanks for posting. Don't be shy... post away as we can all learn from each other!

Regarding PHV - the best way is to track height and quarterly is fine. You could ask the kids / parents to track it in the off-season. Most people I knew growing up had a place on the wall where they would take annual / semi-annual measurements of their kids, so maybe someone has this? If not, perhaps the local MHA that you work within could encourage parents to take regular measures; especially in the off-season - so they can forward this info during registration to the coach? Some will / most probably won't (human nature tendint toward the lazy side!)

Regarding PHV, below is some info from the Canadian Sport 4 Life site:
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More on Developmental Age

LTAD looks mainly at two types of “age”. The first is chronological age, which refers to the number of years and days elapsed since birth. This is the typical definition of age used by schools, sports and recreation programs.

The second is developmental age, which refers to the child’s stage of physical, mental, emotional and intellectual maturity. Two children of the same chronological age can be several years apart in developmental age.

For example, we have all seen 13 year old boys who have started their growth spurts and ones who have not. They look very different and they often have very different capacities for physical activity (e.g. strength, stamina, speed).

Figure 4 Maturation in Girls and Boys (Adapted from "Growing Up" by J.M. Tanner Scientific American 1973).

LTAD requires the identification of early, average, and late maturers in order to help to design appropriate training and competition programs for each athlete. The beginning of the growth spurt and the peak of the growth spurt are especially important to program design.

Peak Height Velocity (PHV) refers to the point in time where a child is growing at the fastest rate – the peak of their growth spurt.

PHV in girls usually occurs at about 12 years of age. Usually the first physical sign of adolescence is breast budding, which occurs slightly after the onset of the growth spurt. Shortly thereafter, pubic hair begins to grow. Menarche, or the onset of menstruation, comes rather late in the growth spurt, occurring after PHV is achieved. The sequence of developmental events may normally between the ages of 10 and 14 or even more years earlier or later than average.

Figure 5 Maturity Events in Girls (Modified after Ross et al.1977)

PHV in boys is more intense than in girls and on average occurs about 2 years later (around 14 years of age). Growth of the testes, pubic hair, and penis are related to the maturation process.

Boys experience a large gain in strength about a year after PHV as a result there is pronounced late gain in strength characteristics of the male athlete. As with girls, the developmental sequence for male athletes may occur 2 or more years earlier or later than average.

Figure 6 Maturity Events in Boys (Modified after Ross et al.1977)

Early maturing athletes may have as much as a 4-year development advantage over their late-maturing peers. Eventually, the late maturers will catch up when they experience their growth spurt.

Currently, most training and competition programs are based on chronological age. However, same-age athletes between 10-16 years can be 4-5 years apart developmentally. This means that training and competition programs may serve some of them well, but work against the needs of others.

In addition to chronological age and developmental age, LTAD also considers training age and sport training age.

Training age refers to the number of years an athlete has been training in a variety of sports, beginning with the early sampling years prior to the growth spurt.

Sport training age refers to the number of years an athlete has trained in one specific sport.

The tempo of a child’s growth and maturation has significant implications in sport. Children who mature at an early age have a big advantage during the Train to Train stage compared to average or late maturers.

However, after everyone has had their growth spurt, it is often later maturers who have greater potential to become top athletes – provided they were still given quality coaching during the difficult period when they were lagging behind their peers in development.

http://canadiansportforlife.ca/ten-key-factors/more-developmental-age

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More about Train to Train

During the Train to Train stage of LTAD, physical changes take place faster in the athlete than at younger ages. Training programs need to be designed to account for these rapid changes and the various advantages and disadvantages that they present in athlete development.

Athletes must be constantly monitored in order to understand how their growth and maturation is affecting their training and vice versa.

Peak Height Velocity (PHV)

During the Train to Train stage, athletes are entering their growth spurt and passing through puberty. As they do so, their growth can be measured and plotted to calculate the time when they reach peak height velocity (PHV).

PHV is an important marker for determining which physical capacities can be trained effectively and safely during this stage. For example, aerobic training should be a priority after reaching PHV.

Growth impeding performance

During the growth spurt, especially if the growth spurt happens exceptionally quickly, athlete skills and movement abilities may be significantly impeded. Coaches may need to explain to the athletes why their motor skills and movement abilities have been negatively affected, so the athletes can understand that this is a natural event that will pass with time.

General considerations during Train to Train

Emphasize suppleness (flexibility) training to accommodate the rapid growth of bones, tendons, ligaments, and muscles.

Address the sensitive periods of accelerated adaptation to strength training. For boys, the sensitive period for strength begins 12 to 18 months after PHV. For girls, the sensitive period begins with whichever of the following occurs first in the individual: menarche or the onset of Peak Weight Velocity (PWV). Some girls will experience PWV prior to menarche, while others will experience menarche prior to PWV.

Both aerobic and strength trainability are dependent on the maturation of the athlete. For this reason, the timing of training emphasis may differ between athletes depending on whether they are early, average, or late maturers.

Athletes need to learn to cope with the physical and mental challenges of competition.

For all athletes, the use of body-size and skill-level appropriate equipment remains important.

Optimize training and competition ratios and follow a 60:40 percent training to competition ratio.

Too much competition wastes valuable training time; too little competition reduces the practical application and development of technique, tactics, and decision-making skills under realistic competition conditions.

Use talent identification to help athletes focus on two sports.

Utilize single and double periodization plans to prepare athletes.

During training, include competitive situations in the form of practice matches or competitive games and drills.

A key reason why many athletes hit a plateau during later stages of their development has to do with too much competition and not enough training during this stage.

Competition is most valuable when it is used to develop strategic and tactical understanding. The focus must be on the learning process and not the outcome.

http://canadiansportforlife.ca/train-train/more-about-train-train

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Hope this helps you Dave! (I agree - we have our cutoffs based on the calendar / biological year instead of physical maturity / PHV markers... too bad because if we did it the right way, kids would compete against each other with similar sizes and perhaps this would be a partial solution to teaching checking / how to take a check / concussion / respect issues...) Keep learning and providing a knowledgeable influence to your local MHA! That is how we can enact positive change!

When I was In Junior High and High School ages 12-18 school the school sports categorized players using the McLoy system which was a formula based on age, height, weight. You played Junior varsity if you were under a certain score. If you were really close and a dominant player they could move you up to Varsity.

The formula was.
20 x age
6 x height in inches
+ weight.

The age included monts somehow so if you were 14 in June and they figured it out in Sept it was 14 + 2/12 x 20

I think this was a great way to even things out and prevent a 5'2" 110 lb. playing football vs his 6'2' 200 lb. friend.

I grew really late i.e. 5'2" and 100 lbs. at the start of grade 10 and was born at the end of October, so I usually played JV an extra year vs people more my size. I was lucky in hockey and baseball two non school sports because the cutoff date for age at that time was Aug. 1 and not Jan. 1 as most sports are now. So I was in the first 3 months and not 11 months younger.

Size differences are the biggest in the early teens and the key is always who fills in at the chest first. If a player has a large chest and broad shoulders then he isn't going to grow much more. Body hair is also a big indicator. Under the armpits, groin, face indicates an early maturer. If your 11 year old phenom centre has to shave between periods he probably isn't going to get much bigger.

Precocity, Player Rankings and Early Specialization

by Brian McCormick, September 6, 2008


We rank third graders. I don’t know who, because I don’t look at player rankings, but someone ranks 3rd grade basketball players.

I read some comments about women’s volleyball rankings yesterday. The comments said that women’s volleyball rankings are a far better predictor of college success because only one group ranks players and they do so after their senior year of high school. In basketball, who doesn’t rank players? It is the easiest way to sell subscriptions to a web site: rank a bunch of kids and get their parents to buy a subscription to see if they are ranked. It gives people something to argue about on message boards, which keeps them coming back and posting more, which increases the hits and the advertising revenue.

It’s all a big business.

The problem with ranking third graders or eight graders is that people want to be right. I trained a player a couple times when he was in eighth grade. He was ranked as one of the top 8th graders in the region and invited to the Area All-Star ShowCase Spectatcular. Good for him. Now, he stopped playing basketball in 10th grade to focus on football. He never played varsity basketball. However, he was invited to the same All-Star Spectacular in 12th Grade! The people never bothered to take his name off the list. He was still considered a top prospect and he did not even play the sport any longer and never really showed anything more than the size needed to excel.

When we rate players at a young age, two things happen:

(1) We build high expectations for a kid which puts pressure on the player to perform constantly and justify his lofty ranking every time he steps on the court because the haters wait with their wireless internet cards to bash the player as soon as he has a bad game; and

(2) We create a self-fulfilling prophesy where the rankers want to see the player do well to show that they are right, so they introduce the player to trainers and AAU teams and get the player free stuff, which creates the Entitlement Affliction: players and parents believe they have something special which means they deserve something in return.

The problem is that precocity is largely a myth. Just because someone excels at nine-years-old or 14-years-old does not guarantee success. In the volleyball argument, some suggested that basketball coaches do a much better job developing players than volleyball coaches, which explains why the rankings are more accurate predictors for volleyball. I disagree. Some of it has to do with sex (boys vs. girls) and different ages of maturation, but much of it has to do with inaccurate rankings because rankings do not measure the important things like work ethic, desire, competitiveness and the like because one cannot see those things in a brief glimpse of a player during a game.

Malcolm Gladwell writes:

We think of precociousness as an early form of adult achievement, and, according to Gladwell, that concept is much of the problem. “What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement.”

To be a prodigy in music, for example, is to be a mimic, to reproduce what you hear from grown-up musicians. Yet only rarely, according to Gladwell, do child musical prodigies manage to make the necessary transition from mimicry to creating a style of their own.

The “prodigy midlife crisis,” as it has been called, proves fatal to all but a handful would-be Mozarts.

“Precociousness, in other words, is not necessarily or always a prelude to adult achievement. Sometimes it’s just its own little discrete state.”

A “precocious” third grader is oftentimes almost a year older than his peers and therefore is bigger, stronger and faster.

However, over time, these size differences balance out.

The future seven-footer is likely gangly and awkward as a nine-year-old or even a 13-year-old. What constitutes an exceptional skill level at nine or 13 differs at 18 or 19-years-old. We get excited when a kid can throw the ball in the basket from the three-point line at nine-years-old: however, does that skill translate when he is fully grown?

Early acquisition of skills which is often what we mean by precocity may thus be a misleading indicator of later success,

said Gladwell. “Sometimes we call a child precocious because they acquire a certain skill quickly, but that skill turns out to be something where speed of acquisition is not at all important. We don’t say that someone who learned to walk at four months is a better walker than the rest of us. It’s not really a meaningful category.”

Kids shoot differently at 13-years-old than they will at 18-years-old. They use more legs, they dip the ball to get strength, they shoot from a lower release point. When they shoot consistently at a young age, does that translate to better adult shooting? Or, does it lead to a sense of satisfaction and a desire not to change the shot and learn a higher release or quicker shot?

In music, people point to Mozart. However, “First of all, the music he composes at four isn’t any good,” Gladwell stated bluntly. In the same respect, we get excited about the “best” 4th grader, but does he really play good basketball? When he reaches to get steals because officials do not call fouls or dribbles coast to coast because he is faster, is that goo basketball, at an adult level?

Rather than physical gifts, are there better indicators of future success. In academia, Gladwell points to Einstein:

A better poster child for what precociousness really entails, Gladwell hinted, may thus be the famous intellectual late-bloomer, Einstein.

Gladwell cited a biographer’s description of the future physicist, who displayed no remarkable native intelligence as a child but whose success seems to have derived from certain habits and personality traits curiosity, doggedness, determinedness that are the less glamorous but perhaps more essential components of genius.

If a 13-year-old is tall and fast, but lacks determination and a work ethic, will he be a top player when he is a senior in high school? Gladwell used his personal example of his running career:

“I was a running prodigy,” he said bluntly. But being a prodigy didn’t forecast future success in running. After losing a major race at age 15, then enduring other setbacks and loss of interest, Gladwell said, he gave up running for a few years. Taking it up again in college with the same dedication as before he faced a disappointing truth: “I realized I wasn’t one of the best in the country I was simply okay.”

Of the 15 nationally ranked runners in his age class at age 13 or 14, only one of that group had been a top runner in his running prime, at age 24. Indeed, the number-one miler at age 24 was someone Gladwell had known as one of the poorer runners when they were young Doug Consiglio, a “gawky kid” of whom all the other kids asked “Why does he even bother?”

The early success often leads to a fixed mindset, where the child believes his talent is innate.

As long as he is on top, that’s fine.

However, when faced with a challenge, or setback, the answer is often to give up, as there is no sense in working hard if talent is innate and it has been proven that you are not the chosen one.

Labeling a child precocious creates more pressure to perform. I don’t understand the parents who seek opportunities for their child to be rated.

People tell me all the time that if a kid is not rated they will not be recruited.

I can list a dozen kids I have helped get to college programs who nobody had ever heard of and who had never been ranked. Colleges use rankings to get names. However, nobody gets scholarships based on their ranking. Coaches watch players and make their own decisions. I don’t know any college coaches who care who the top 5th graders are (except maybe Billie Gillespie!). Nobody wins awards for being the top 5th grader.

Spending an entire childhood worried about player rankings and college scholarships ruins the childhood experience and confuses the destination with the journey.

To develop talent, it is more important to impart and develop skills like industriousness, work ethic, desire and competitiveness than to concentrate on maintaining one’s player ranking.