The role of relative age, playing position, and height and weight in Canadian Hockey League draft selection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Relative age effects describe the over-representation of those born earlier in their youth-sport selection year (i.e., the relatively older) on elite sports teams. However, in the long-term relatively younger players may be more sought after (Baker & Logan, 2007). This study extends prior research by exploring talent identification processes prior to professional sport. The Ontario, Western and Quebec Major Junior Hockey Leagues (i.e., OHL, WHL and QMJHL) are developmental leagues for professional hockey, drafting eligible players who are 15 years of age. Canadian players’ relative age, playing position, weight, height, and draft round were collected for each entry draft within the leagues (OHL: 1999-2012, N = 3537; WHL: 2011-2012, N = 415; QMJHL: 2003-2012, N = 2275). The overall sample of each league reflected significant relative age effects [OHL: χ2 = 873.7, p < 001, w = .49; WHL: χ2 = 126.3, p < 001, w = .55; QMJHL: χ2 = 186.8, p < 001, w = .28). There were also small, positive correlations between relative age and draft round found in each league (r < .12). With the exception of the QMJHL, athletes’ weight (r = -.09 to - .20, p < .05) and height (r = - .11 to - .17, p < .01) were also associated with earlier draft round selection. Further, centres were drafted earlier than other positions. These results showed a small advantage for relatively older youth in the CHL drafts, although height, weight and position were stronger predictors of draft round.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".