Christy O'Connor on how the GAA can do more for late developing underage players

IN an interview with talkSPORT a few weeks back, Roy Massey recalled his decision to let Harry Kane go at the age of 11 when Massey was the Arsenal Academy manager.

“To release Harry Kane… we don’t have a crystal ball,” said Massey. “If we did then we would be successful in every youngster that we take on. He just didn’t have what we thought it would take to become a professional footballer. And we were totally mistaken.”

After Kane was released, he played for his Sunday league club for the next three years and was only 15 when he went to Spurs. Kane may have gotten away but Massey still brought through players like Bukayo Saka, Jack Wilshere, Emile Smith-Rowe, Josh Dasilva and Joe Willock, all of whom have gone on to have successful careers in the Premier League.

In the middle of the last decade, professional football and rugby clubs in England finally began waking up to the injustices of the far-from-level playing field that confronts many young players.

Premier League teams in both sports began experimenting with “bio-banding” — the practice of grouping young players together according to their physical maturity, rather than their age.

Those professional clubs soon began to appreciate bio-banding’s ability to identify late developers, especially when youth players who go through puberty before their peers were likely to be spotted by scouts earlier. That subsequently meant more support, encouragement and access to coaching and training resources, but at a cost of ignoring kids who could have the most potential down the line — like Kane.

LEVEL

In 2015, the first bio-banded football tournament in England was organised, involving youth squad members aged 11 to 14 drawn from four clubs — Southampton, Reading, Stoke City and Norwich City.

They were clearly onto something. And sports everywhere else began to take note — including the GAA.

Bio-banding is not new. It was first trialled in US high schools as far back as 1908. For years, New Zealand schools have grouped rugby teams by weight rather than age because Maori and Polynesian children tend to develop faster.

Bio-banding also allows coaches to tailor youth training programmes. Growth bursts carry an increased risk of injury and young children will respond differently based on their biology.

Former Kerry footballer Fionn Fitzgerald, a lecturer in MTU Tralee’s Department of Health and Leisure, undertook a doctorate in that topic, with his research proving a coach’s eye is not a valid method of estimating maturation.

A study of his, with the cooperation of Kerry GAA’s fledgling performance and research department, along with some teams in Cork, uncovered some interesting material. Of 247 male players that featured in the Kerry U14 to U16 football development squads, and their peers in north Cork last year, just one was what would be termed a late maturing player.

The rest were either early maturing biologically or on-time, typical of someone their age.

For his Masters degree Fitzgerald had already studied the relative age effect; how someone born in January is much more likely than someone born in December to be selected for representative GAA underage teams.

Yet research like Fitzgerald’s is making coaches more aware of the early mature bias rampant in most talent identification and development systems.

In their study of the U14s, they found one player that was 62kg and much taller than another kid that was just 35kg; biologically the first kid was 16-and-a-half years old and the other lad was only 13. But the predicted adult height [a formula in which you combine the current height and weight of the player with that of his parents’] of the smaller player is 172cm. 

They estimated that the other player will only finish up being 170cm, meaning that the smaller kid now will end up being the taller of the two.

The trick is to keep those players in the system, with bio-banding the obvious pathway. Earlier this year, Clare and Limerick played bio-banding U14 hurling games against each other, led by Rob Mulcahy and Darragh Droog, athletic heads of development in both counties.

There was also a bio-banding game last summer between the Kerry North U16s and their counterparts in Kerry South.

RELATIVE

The results were obvious. No physically strong player dominated as every player had an equal-sized player marking them. They all had an equal chance.

Bio-banding and a greater awareness of early mature bias and the relative-age-effect should become pervasive throughout the GAA in the coming years. The more units, club and county, that can collect data, the better.

“We’re increasingly talking about a player-centred coaching approach and for anyone coaching underage players this is a big piece of the jigsaw,” Fitzgerald said to Kieran Shannon in the Irish Examiner a few months back.

And sometimes, that piece of the jigsaw can be absolutely massive. Just ask Harry Kane. And Roy Massey.