The Crosby Curve

According to the U.S. Census Bureau there are 75 million kids under the age of 18 running around our country. Of course, they're not all the time "running" per se, since the average kid spends about 28 hours a week in front of the Tv and an equally impressive whole of hours on line or thumbing text messages. But you can hardly blame them. The technology is unavoidably accessible and the motion of such capability viewing article as Mtv's Jersey Shore and the Internet's YouTube is arguably irresistible (says I, with only a hint of sarcasm). But kids are of course running around nevertheless (or maybe marginally-the-less). Agreeing to publicly accepted data - and the escalating mileage of America's mini vans - over 40 million of them are playing competitive sports within a collection of organized youth programs. And the addition level of participation in organized youth sports has been a consistent trend over the past two decades. Any way the inquire is, are kids of course "playing" more?

Unfortunately, while we have good data on things like hours of television viewing, childhood obesity rates and registrations for organized youth sports, we of course don't have a good sense of how often kids engage in "pick-up play" versus "organized play." contribution a nostalgic perspective (which is just a kindly term for an old fart's perspective), it is clear that the ratio of pick-up play to organized play has been dramatically reduced over the past several decades. Kids are spending more time playing under the watchful eye of parents, trainers and volunteer coaches than they are playing informal (and unsupervised) driveway hoops, backyard running bases and pond hockey. All of this is part of a trend that Dr. Dan Gould, the director of the Michigan State University manufacture for the Study of Youth Sport, calls the "professionalization of youth sports."

Kids Overalls

Experts are still trying to sort out the cause - and the impact - of this emerging cultural trend. A whole of theoretical explanations have surfaced. One is that the adult community (i.e., the parents) have been somehow influenced to believe that achieving excellence in youth sports can lead to the rewards of college scholarships down the road. But of course, we've seen the fantastic mathematical improbability of that occurrence. Someone else more likely factor is simply the human ego. As adults, we have an instinctive urge to see our children thrive and excel in their lives. As a society, we have commercially and socially settled an enormously huge value on sports operation as a portion of personel worth. Put the two factors together and you can see why habitancy freak out on the sidelines every time petite Jimmy or Sally drops the ball (pun intended). We have made all of this matter too much.

The Crosby Curve

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So what's the solution? Well there's no known antidote for a problem that is still not well understood. But it seems that, since we are combating our own egos and the pressure of others' perceptions, we should probably push the reset button on the one thing that can control both of those factors - perspective. And that's why we should look intimately at the very best athletes in the world.

The Crosby Curve

It's been said that to perform expertise in any endeavor, it requires a minimum of 10 years and 10,000 hours of practice. It's hard to argue with that premise, given the strangeness of perfecting such tasks as performing a bypass operation, playing a Tchaikovsky concerto on the violin, or hitting a 90-mph fastball out of the ballpark. But when it comes to youth sports (and musical performances as well, I would suppose) our egos seem to keep us from realizing that custom is only one part of the equation for excellence. Otherwise, every kid who played hockey for 10 years and practiced for 10,000 hours would be as good as Sidney Crosby (who some would argue is the best hockey player on the planet).

The very fact that in every sport there is one rare, incredibly talented pro athlete (e.g., Crosby, Federer, Tiger, LeBron, Peyton, etc.) that rises significantly above the rest of the rare, incredibly talented pro athletes tells us that there are many more factors complex in achieving excellence in any sport (or any other discipline, for that matter) than just mere custom time. That's why I originate a chart which I call "The Crosby Curve."

The chart loosely represents what Sidney Crosby's skill level might have looked like throughout his development. Let's assume that the left axis represents the level of operation that a human being could perform in terms of wide hockey skill, with a "10" on the upper left angle representing the actual maximum skill level. Placing "Age" on the lowest axis, we can then track the most talented hockey player in the world as he advanced his skills throughout his lifetime to date. As of today, we can assume that Crosby has achieved a level "10" - or the maximum level of expertise achievable in his field. We can also assume that throughout his childhood, his level of skill improvement at any age (e.g., a level "3" at age 5, a level "8" at age 14) was most likely higher than just about anything else of that same age, even compared to the thousands of kids who were logging the same whole of ice time and custom sessions as he was. Indeed, like many superstars, Crosby was widely heralded for his hockey talents even well before puberty set in.

So what does this Crosby Curve tell us? It tells us that the countless dollars and hours of time we invest in structured custom time, organized playing time, and personel lessons will still only get our children so far. As the chart suggests, the other intangibles, such as thinking aptitude (e.g., desire, passion, instincts, etc) and God-given natural ability, are ultimately far bigger contributors to one's wide skill level. The fact is that no matter how much we may want our kids to be the Sidney Crosby, Roger Federer or LeBron James of the time to come - or even of our gift local community - we can't manufacture it to be so. Even if we max our kids out on playing time and formal instruction, we are still faced with the reality that our kids' "performance curve" will be well below that of the Crosby Curve. As the saying goes, "you can't teach speed." And you can't manufacture talent.

So I hate to deflate the visions of grandeur that anything has about their kid's time to come draft prospects. But here's the good news about what the Crosby Curve does to help us adjust our perspective and come to be more grounded: it takes the pressure off of us! By realizing that the majority of responsibility for either or not our children result in sports is of course out of our hands, we can now relax, sit back and enjoy anything level of participation and operation they of course achieve. For most of us, this would be a fantastic epiphany; one that would free us from the burden of feeling anxious about every game; one that would originate no other duty than to sign them up, drive them there, cheer for them and let nature take care of the rest.

And so for that I say, thank you Sidney Crosby.

The Crosby Curve

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