Size of players relative to performance

[coach james]

For my team in particular, I have a lot of "bigger" girls. They are athletic, tall, and on average about 150#, 5'8"... This has both advantages and disadvantages. We have tremendous power but we lack speed. So our singles should have been doubles and doubles could have been triples etc... We only have two real speed threats who can slap, but if they get on base its almost automatic that they're scoring.
Defensively, its more of a disadvantage, because they lack the range needed. However to play on a smaller field also means you don't need to have the same coverage abilities that a CF in baseball needs!

 

[Westwind]

The size thing is so full of traps, tricks and problems. I have one dd who was small for her age until recently and one who has always been taller and stronger built than her age. One is like a roll of wire and the other... I don't know how to describe her other than solid. Her Dr. Always shows us how he plots height and weight and is very clear she is not overweight but she is just built solid. Both have the same parents, both eat the same, both go to a very demanding speed program, both play basketball as a second sport but they are different body types. Both have worked very hard and I think it's fair to say they are good ball players but their routes were different and my smaller one has always had to prove she has game whereas the other one gets noticed right away.

O.k., so I have a couple examples of how this physical size thing can screw a coach in tryouts. Last summer one dd was on a second year 10's team. We had two girls, one 8 and one 9 who were the youngest and smallest kids on the team. Both build on small frames and looked little. My gosh though, any coach that wouldn't take either one is a fool, fast, strong and the 9 year old burned the outfielders constantly last summer. The other team would see her come up, move everybody in and she would smoke one over where they originally were. She may have hit the deepest ball I have ever seen a 10u hit. Both of these kids had the fire and would start on any 10u team in the area based on skill and performance, not size. I think both could have moved up to 12's with us easily.

Here is the other side of that deal. My other dd has numerous girls in her class who were tall and or big for their class. Her class won about every sport we played. Now they are in h.s. And those girls are no longer the biggest. They are still gifted athletes but they are not dominating the competition and some of them have not dealt with that well. They have never had to work as hard and the fact that they do now just to be average or a little above average is hard on them. They never learned to deal with it. I think there are a lot of reasons why every kid isn't a successful h.s. Athlete but this sure seems to figure in. I think their parents and coaches did them a great disservice by not finding competition that can whip their butts and by continuously reminding them how good and unbeatable they are.

I recently met the former starting ss for Mizzou. She was very fit, very athletic looking, I'd seen video of her hitting and I assumed she was big strong girl. I was half right, she is strong. And quietly confident. Exactly the kind of player every coach wants but not tall. I wouldn't have picked her from across the room as a D1 athlete. My "little one" is about the same height!

What I'm trying to say here is you are a fool if you pigeonhole athletes by their size whether you are a coach or parent. Develop them all, you don't know who will grow or quit growing.

 

[Bart Bouse]

A lot of good thoughts here. But, it's hard to speak in generalities but as a coach and a father of two smaller girls who play there is a definite bias. I've done it myself, believing the larger, taller, player would be better, stronger, faster. It's human nature. Look at the studies done on the relative success of tall people in business, politics, etc. There is truth to it despite what us short people want to believe. I've also seen large players, maybe fat, wash out by 13. I had a great player in 8s and 10s who left my team when we started practicing four days a week in May and June heat. She went to a rec league then didn't make the school team in August. I saw her crying her eyes out to her mother. All that aside, I continue to encourage my short daughters. Visiting D1 and D2 schools in Oklahoma, I can point out girls to them that are short, small and playing. OU was a fairly large team last year but still had Destiny Martinez, etc. I can show you the pictures of my very short daughters next to her. She's not big. I made the mistake last year of asking an Oklahoma State University player helping at a camp if she was a high school student who was an employee. Oops. Turns out she was a junior transfer from a small school in California. I'd would have guessed her at 15 to 16 years of age at best. Nope, 20 year old junior probably 5'3" and 110 pounds. My girls were at an OCU batting camp, a D2 school with 8 national championships, last week and the assistant college made fun of one of her players for being small, in a joking manner. Wow! She was probably 5'2' and maybe 100 pounds. Her teammates, many of whom were 5'9" or more towered over her. So, I tell my daughters there is always a place and softball doesn't discriminate. That may be a little white lie.

 

[wichita]

I was pointing out one of the asinine comments I hear about my daughter. I wasn't expecting anyone to actually agree with the idea that tall kids aren't any good!

Not saying that tall girls aren't very good. Some are extremely good but there's also a lot of tall girls that aren't very good or as good as girls that are smaller in size. So college coaches will take these kids instead of a smaller girl that is a skilled player because the thought is that that coach can teach the tall player the skills needed but I'm not sure this works out a lot of the time. Now the exception to this is that a small girl can can be recruited to a top-mid D1 program if she plays for a top tier travel org. I.E. Frecrakers, Btbusters, Corona Angels, Beverly Bandits etc., because the coaches figure there well coached

 

[sru]

Interesting thread. At the higher levels, size will get you noticed, but most of the time it won't close the deal. Skill should trump all when it comes to assessing a players ability to play the game. It seems every sport has lots of examples to the rule (except maybe horse racing and gymnastics).

At the World Junior Fastpitch Championship last summer, Japan was clearly the class of the tourny. The batting line up was sprinkled with power AND slappers with speed. Not to many big girls either (height or weight).

 

[Scorekeeper]

…What I'm trying to say here is you are a fool if you pigeonhole athletes by their size whether you are a coach or parent. Develop them all, you don't know who will grow or quit growing.

That’s basically the same thing I’ve been saying for over 20 years now, but have had many more people tell me how stupid I am than agree. It’s a bias that’s built into sports, and I’m sorry to say its gonna always be there.

 

[Scorekeeper]

Bart Bouse,

Yes, there are lots of studies showing that taller is better, but those studies are almost always done on the final pool, not the original one. Because of that, the pool used doesn’t represent the entire spectrum, but rather the pool the bias provided.

 

[SoCal_Dad]

Malcolm Gladwell did some interesting research on this for his book Outliers and discovered birth dates can have a significant effect. Kids born right after the cutoff date tend to be bigger and more developed than kids born up to 12 months after them.

It's a beautiful example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In Canada, the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey programs is Jan. 1. Canada also takes hockey really seriously, so coaches start streaming the best hockey players into elite programs, where they practice more and play more games and get better coaching, as early as 8 or 9. But who tends to be the "best" player at age 8 or 9? The oldest, of course -- the kids born nearest the cut-off date, who can be as much as almost a year older than kids born at the other end of the cut-off date. When you are 8 years old, 10 or 11 extra months of maturity means a lot.

So those kids get special attention. That's why there are more players in the NHL born in January and February and March than any other months. You see the same pattern, to an even more extreme degree, in soccer in Europe and baseball here in the U.S. It's one of those bizarre, little-remarked-upon facts of professional sports. They're biased against kids with the wrong birthday.

 

[wichita]

Interesting thread. At the higher levels, size will get you noticed, but most of the time it won't close the deal. Skill should trump all when it comes to assessing a players ability to play the game. It seems every sport has lots of examples to the rule (except maybe horse racing and gymnastics).

At the World Junior Fastpitch Championship last summer, Japan was clearly the class of the tourny. The batting line up was sprinkled with power AND slappers with speed. Not to many big girls either (height or weight).

It should but from what I've seen this isn't the case

 

[Vertigo]

SoCal - I completely agree with you on what you stated. Luckily for my dd, she is the tallest (although by far not the heaviest) while being the youngest.

ETA: When I talked about the girl on our 10U team who was (for all intents and purposes) a "woman," her birthday was in January, so she was several months to almost a year older than most of our other girls. She also happened to bloom early.