Does a rule change eliminating body checking alter the relative age effect in Ontario minor ice hockey?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In sport, relative age effects (RAE) occur when there is an over-representation of athletes born early in a selection year, as compared to relatively younger athletes who are born later in the selection year. It has been posited that slight age differences within a one-year cohort lead to performance and participation advantages, typically based on physical development (Wattie, Cobley, & Baker, 2008). Recently, Hockey Canada prohibited body checking in the 9- and 10-year-old age division (Atom), which allowed us to examine how reduced physicality within the sport might alter the RAE. The purpose of the study was to investigate the RAE of athletes who played with, or without, the body checking rule by inspecting the birth rate distributions of Atom players. Separate analyses for a cross-sectional and a quasi-longitudinal dataset demonstrated significant RAEs in both samples regardless of whether body checking was permitted. Inspection of effect sizes and standardized residuals revealed slight decreases in the strength of the RAE when body checking was not permitted, though this was limited to the second and third birth quartiles. Furthermore, it appeared that the changes in RAEs were most prevalent at lower levels of competition. Results indicate that the physical nature of a sport might, in fact, impact the RAE. Discussion focuses on implications the results have for sport scientists examining moderating factors of the RAE.Acknowledgments: We would like to acknowledge the Ontario Hockey Federation for their assistance with the current study.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".