Awards in Ultimate

There is a caveat on all that follows; in a team sport like ultimate, individual awards are nothing but a bit of craic. Don't get too hung up on them. Keep your eyes on the team's prize. Win some games, win a championship, win the spirit prize.

I therefore think that the tradition of naming MVPs among teams and at tournament finals is an odd tradition. Regardless of whether a particular MVP was on the winning or losing team.

Given that it happens in other sports, non-ultimate players can relate to these awards, and that's not a bad thing. And the annual IFDA awards are a great excuse for an fun awards ball. So I do like the awards.

There is one set of awards that I've found really odd though; the IFDA 'team of the year'. The one where a panel of experts chooses the 7 best players across all divisions. Looking for it on the website, I can't find it. Maybe they got rid of that? Comparing players from different divisions was ridiculously arbitrary anyway- and  the panel of experts implied that the award had notions of not being as arbitrary as the 'everyone gets a vote' main awards.

I think Rob Kiely had previously suggested a GAA style All-star awards system: picking an all-star team for each gender, with players specified for each position. Such an idea would definitely allow non ultimate players to understand what the award is about. And it does seem to make more sense: no longer comparing men with women or specialist handlers with specialist deeps.

I bring it up now, because that awards ceremony is a long way away. I don't want to offend anyone that won anything, and any changes to the award system would most sensibly be made well in advance.

(this is a link)

The January Effect

I first heard this term from Malcolm Gladwell; it's something he discusses in his book 'Outliers' (Amazon Link), with regard to the birthdays of professional ice hockey players. And This article looks at the same effect in a study of the birthdays of Aussie rules players. These have found that a disproportionate number of top sports people have birthdays early in the year.

The idea here is that if you are born early in the year, you'll do well at youth sports by virtue of being considerably older than someone born later in the year. This advantage then means that you're more likely to get picked onto regional teams or the best teams, where you'll then get the best coaching and resources, thus increasing your advantage.

So if you want to have a kid that's good at sports, mid April should be good :-)

Now obviously, in Ireland at least, there's nowhere near enough youth ultimate for the January effect to happen. I do wonder though, would all the January kids, benefiting from this effect go on to play the mainstream sports, leaving behind any sport inclined December kids to find ultimate later in life?

Well, I decided to see if I could use any data to prove or disprove this theory. I took the birthdays of all 24 of this year's Irish national open team (not hard to find), and calculated the average. In a group with a 'January effect', the average birthday would be very early in the year. And for an inverse January effect, the opposite would be the case.

I found that the average birthday is July 13th. Which is a little after half way through the year. Of course, I've got a sample size of 24 - this is ridiculously small. If a player with a January birthday had been selected ahead of the player with the last birthday in the year (Hag), the average would move to before halfway. I definitely haven't proven anything.

And for all I know, January 1st isn't the cut-off date for all of the main youth sports in Ireland. Blonde Rob just told me that soccer only changed it to January 1st a few years ago. Making my theory even more rubbish.

Aside: While I was working out the average birthday of the national open team, I had a look at the average age too. It's 26. By the time of EUC2011, it'll be 26 years, 8 months and 19 days. Back at WUGC 2004, I remember a few lads worked out an approximate average age of our team -which was something like 20 or 21. Things have changed.