Relative Age Effects are a developmental problem in tennis: but not necessarily when you’re left‐handed!

@article{Loffing2010RelativeAE,
  title={Relative Age Effects are a developmental problem in tennis: but not necessarily when you’re left‐handed!},
  author={Florian Loffing and J. Schorer and Stephen Paul Cobley},
  journal={High Ability Studies},
  year={2010},
  volume={21},
  pages={19 - 25}
}
Relative Age Effects (RAEs), describing attainment inequalities as a result of interactions between biological age and age‐grouping procedures, have been demonstrated across many sports contexts. This study examined whether an additional individual characteristic (i.e., handedness) mediated RAEs in tennis. Relative age and handedness distributions of 1027 male professional tennis players ranked in the year‐end ATP Top 500 for 2000–2006 were analyzed. Relatively older players, born in the first… 
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Highly Influential Citations
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Background Citations
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Methods Citations
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50 Citations

Handedness and Relative Age in International Elite Interactive Individual Sports Revisited

The hypothesis that left-handedness helps override birth-related inequalities in high sporting achievement in elite interactive individual sports in interactive sports is not supported.

Left-Handedness in Professional and Amateur Tennis

The positive impact of left-handed performance on high achievement in elite tennis was moderate and decreased in male professionals over time and was almost absent in female professionals, in accordance with the frequency-dependent hypothesis.

Evidence of relative age effects in Swedish women's ice hockey

Relative age effects (RAEs) refer to consequences of differences in chronological age among individuals within age-grouped cohorts. RAEs advantage relatively older players and have consistently been…

The Relative Age Effect in Sport: A Developmental Systems Model

This paper reviews and summarizes the existing literature on relative age in sport, and proposes a constraints-based developmental systems model for RAEs in sport.

Examining Variations Between Everyday Life Handedness and Lateral Preferences for Sport-Specific Skills in Children.

Purpose: This study aimed to analyze both sport-specific lateral preferences and handedness for everyday life tasks among school-aged children. Method: A total of 533 children (254 males and 279…

Developmental contexts, depth of competition and relative age effects in sport: A database analysis and a quasi- experiment

AbstractImproving learning environments requires an understanding of biases and restrictions of current environments. The widely used policy of grouping youth into 'age groups' for education and…

Left Preference for Sport Tasks Does Not Necessarily Indicate Left-Handedness: Sport-Specific Lateral Preferences, Relationship with Handedness and Implications for Laterality Research in Behavioural Sciences

It is concluded that task-specific reference values are mandatory for reliably testing for an excess of athletes with a left preference, the term ‘handedness’ should be more cautiously used within the context of sport-related laterality research and observation of lateral preferences in sports may be of limited suitability for the verification of evolutionary theories of handedness.

The Relative Age Effect and Physical Fitness Characteristics in German Male Tennis Players.

Players born later in the selection year and still selected in elite squads were likely to be similar across a range of physical fitness attributes compared with those born earlier in the year, and the selection process should be reevaluated and changed to reduce the impact of RAEs on tennis players.

Relative age effects

The process of annual age-grouping, applied most commonly in school and sport, has been shown to produce a developmental climate that provides advantages to some while disadvantaging others. This…

Relative Age Effect in Swedish Male and Female Tennis Players Born in 1998–2001

Suggestions made in this article include recognising RAE when designing the format of competitions/tournaments, not using official rankings until the juniors get older, addressing RAE in a "gender sensitive" way, and conducting further in-depth studies in which RAE is understood/examined as being associated with environmental factors.

References

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