Birthdates and Hockey

When you drive between L.A. and Phoenix, this is the scenery for four hours.

"Jesus had a lousy hockey birthday," my 14 year old son said from the back seat.

"Yes, I guess so, hon," my wife and I agreed from the front seat.

My wife, myself and my twin fourteen year old sons were racing through the Arizona desert at 80 miles an hour, our Honda Odyssey Minivan packed with odorous hockey gear.  We were en route to a youth hockey tournament in Phoenix, Arizona over the Winter Break.  It was only the boys' second time to play hockey outside of California.  The 800 mile/13 hour drive from Santa Rosa was definitely their longest trip for hockey, and our longest family trip by car.

Half of their team had flown down to Phoenix earlier that day, already comfortably settled into the team hotel.

We were halfway between Blythe and Phoenix.  I'd like to be more specific, but there isn't anything between Blythe and Phoenix: just dirt, rocks, sage brush and bare mountains.  Relentless reds and browns with nary anything green in sight.  Each time we pulled into a highway rest stop in Arizona, it was the greatest population center within 50 miles.

We bypassed the one rest stop that was located right next to a state prison, and then all had a good laugh at the road sign a few miles later that read, "Don't pick up hitchhikers!"  Gee, ya' think?  

What you miss when you fly that distance instead of drive is all the quality family time.  You hear everything the kids have on their minds.  And they always have plenty on their minds.  Even going so far as to ponder the ramifications if our Lord Savior had played ice hockey.

During the desert portion of the drive, I had been telling the boys about a new, interesting book I had just read entitled Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell (highly recommended to all, but especially to any hockey fans out there).

In the first chapter of his best-selling book, Gladwell discussed birthdates and how important they were to the development of young athletes.  He took ice hockey, the sport our boys play, as an example.  Because the eligibility dates were January 1st to December 31st, most of the kids born earlier in the year had a slight advantage in a physically demanding sport where size plays such a key role.  Gladwell meticulously went through how players born in the first half of the year were disproportionately represented on NHL and Olympic rosters.

(Here's a link to an interview Gladwell did at the time with ESPN.)

We went through the birthdays of the kids we knew who played hockey and, sure enough, the majority, but not all, of the good hockey players we knew were born in the first six months of the year.

When I coached youth hockey, the birth dates of the players on our team would always be listed next to their names on the team roster.  I thought this was invaluable to remember as a coach.  Even though they might be born in the same birth year, you can't expect the same performance from a child born in November or December as a child born in January or February.  A ten month span was huge for a child's mental and physical development at an early age.  I was never sure coaches were as cognizant of the age differences on a team as they have been.

Our boys were born six weeks premature, common in twins, on November 25.  A lousy hockey birthday.  Had they gone to term, and been born in the first week of January, they would have had the best hockey birthdays imaginable.  Not that birthdates alone should be used as an excuse for skill or performance, but it certainly plays a role in youth sports.  My boys have worked hard and are excellent hockey players, but they would have been much better players, especially when they were younger, had they not been born prematurely.

Hey, NHL great Mario Lemieux was born in October, you say.  Fair enough.  But Wayne Gretzky was born in January.  Six of the top ten NHL scorers of all time were born in January, February or March. 

So an hour or so of that Gladwell-inspired birthdates discussion in the Arizona desert eventually led to my son's astute observation above.  If we had flown to Arizona instead of driven, we may have never had that discussion and realized that Jesus had a lousy hockey birthday.  Maybe so.  But I hear he had a hard wrist shot.  Wicked hard.