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Reclassing? Reclassifying? An interesting article in today's Wall Street Journal about parents holding their straight A students back to repeat 8th

Nittering Nabob

Nittering Nabob

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grade so that they can develop more physically before entering high school so that they can (4 years later) possibly get a better NIL deal. It's apparently growing in popularity. Does anyone know people who have done this? It seems like perverse parenting to me.

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Bison13

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As a HS coach I see it all the time. I also see kids who are young for their grade, play down ( play by age rather than grade). In most cases they aren’t good enough to begin with
 
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PSUForever

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I knew of a kid who did that. He repeated 8th grade and not for academics then switched schools (private to public) for high school. Crazy thing is the parents opted for the kid to spend another year at an expensive private school for his second go around of 8th grade instead of switching to public. He was not playing on that middle school team but in a league.

He plays QB and now has a decent D1 offer but not Power 4. I guess it helped him but he was already big for his age in the older class so it is not like he was behind physically in 8th grade. He ended up being only average if not a little below average size for a D1 QB. Maybe the parents thought he was going to grow more than he did and the extra year would have helped.

It is interesting that when these decisions are being made (8th grade) everyone thinks their kid is destined for NFL stardom then things change over the next 4 years into high school and I wonder if they are really satisfied with that decision.

Another note is these kids who are fine academically and do this can probably easily graduate from high school in Dec of their senior year and then enroll at the college they choose in January. I guess in the long run it puts them behind academically by half a year.

Also maybe the teachers on this board could weigh in on this. If the kid is a good student and for example gets As and Bs in the classes he took in 8th grade then what classes does he take the second time around in 8th grade? It does not seem right that you repeat a class you just got an A or B in. So do you take 9th grade classes? But that doesn't work because if you do that then I would think they would classify you as in 9th grade.
 
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EricStratton-RushChairman

EricStratton-RushChairman

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This has been going on in Texas back before i moved here in '88. Mostly due to football. The crazy new trend though is kids getting voluntary Tommy John surgery at 13-15 years old. And don't get me started about breast implants for 18th birthday.
 
Catch1lion

Catch1lion

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It’s been well documented that kids born in the first quarter have an advantage in sports over those born later in the year .
With my November birthdate, I was unfairly disadvantaged.

Here’s the math if you wish to go deeper.

Relative Age Effect: Beyond the Youth Phenomenon - PMC

Introduction. The relative age effect (RAE) refers to performance advantage of youth born in the first quarter of the birth year when auditioning for select, age-restricted sports. This advantage conferred to the older athlete is a result of being ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
 
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Blair10

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Nittering Nabob said:
grade so that they can develop more physically before entering high school so that they can (4 years later) possibly get a better NIL deal. It's apparently growing in popularity. Does anyone know people who have done this? It seems like perverse parenting to me.

It's the WSJ so it's a paywall link. You might be able to use a paywall blocker to read.


It works if you copy the above link into the following website

RemovePaywall | Free online paywall remover

Remove Paywall, free online paywall remover. Get access to articles without having to pay or login. Works on Bloomberg and hundreds more.
www.removepaywall.com www.removepaywall.com
Click to expand...

This parent strategy is discussed in great detail in Malcolm Gladwell’s classic book named Outliers published in 2008.

Gladwell ties in the sport of junior hockey and the importance of the birthday month for each player.
 
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Bison13

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PSUForever said:
I knew of a kid who did that. He repeated 8th grade and not for academics then switched schools (private to public) for high school. Crazy thing is the parents opted for the kid to spend another year at an expensive private school for his second go around of 8th grade instead of switching to public. He was not playing on that middle school team but in a league.



Most public school systems here in Maryland do not allow you to repeat a grade in middle school if you have acquired enough credits to move on to high school. And I’ve occasionally heard of a couple students who did it, but in both cases, the kid had an IEP, but everyone knew that the parents wanting them to repeat the grade was for athletic reasons.
That’s probably why the person you mentioned did it at a private school. That’s the common way to get around it here. Kids will go to public school through eighth grade and then by that time they figured out if they can make the varsity or whatever they’re trying to do, and if they can’t, then they transfer to a private school who will re-class them.

One of my baseball players did that about eight years ago. He was already a big kid, but his dad thought he was going to go to the majors so he held him back one more year in an effort to get him on the varsity as a freshman. He ended up committing to Maryland after his sophomore season, but because he was older than the other kids, he stopped growing, and never really became who Marilyn thought he would. They ended up pulling his offer and he played at some lower level division, one school for a semester before getting cut from that team and then moving onto division
Click to expand...
 
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Ghost of OM

Ghost of OM

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My son had a very good buddy from elementary through middle school. Parents then chose to send him to a private school to repeat 9th grade so he could get another year to wrestle. Note that the kid was good but not great by any means and I don’t think he really wanted to wrestle all that much. Poor kid pretty much lost all his friends, just barely graduated due to his academics and didn’t wrestle after high school. I liked the parents but they really screwed that decision up.
 
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uh-Clem

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Catch1lion said:
It’s been well documented that kids born in the first quarter have an advantage in sports over those born later in the year .
With my November birthdate, I was unfairly disadvantaged.

Here’s the math if you wish to go deeper.

Relative Age Effect: Beyond the Youth Phenomenon - PMC

Introduction. The relative age effect (RAE) refers to performance advantage of youth born in the first quarter of the birth year when auditioning for select, age-restricted sports. This advantage conferred to the older athlete is a result of being ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Click to expand...
I too was an end of year kid. At 17 I graduated high school at 6 ft, 165 lbs. and finished my freshman year at Penn State at 6' 6" and 215 lbs. Played guard on a bad high school basketball team.
 
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MtNittany

MtNittany

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This has been done forever. Kids also graduate HS early. I had a GF for a year at PSU that graduated HS early and was 17 for awhile when I dated her. She graduated PSU early too - before she ever turned 21. Amazing girl and woman to this day.
 
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op2

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If we could know the truth about everything I bet we'd find lots of academically brilliant college guys that are really good athletes taking cake classes so they can devote the efforts to athletics to make as much money as possible with the idea that they can always do academics after their college sports eligibility is expired.
 
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AvalonJohn

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Bison13 said:
As a HS coach I see it all the time. I also see kids who are young for their grade, play down ( play by age rather than grade). In most cases they aren’t good enough to begin with
Click to expand...
Yup, been through it with hockey. Every parent thought their kid was NHL bound.
 
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