Grouping players by size, not age?
What are your thoughts on this new trial aiming to group aspiring youngsters by build, instead of age? Have a look at the video and then please feel free to comment below…
Thanks to Grant Van Velden (@gvanvelden) for sharing the video.
Rugby Science 
I believe this is already being done in New Zealand? It would be interesting to know the positives and negatives of this.
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Thanks for the comment Chaminda!
I believe NZ used weight categories. This “size” grouping of Bath implies it will consider more than just weight, which has been shown to be a crude measure of maturity…Think of two 80kg 13-year-olds: one is just really overweight while the other is in the midst of puberty and has muscle mass (and maybe skeletal mass) related weight gain which would be advantageous from both a performance and injury prevention point of view. Have a look at this article if you are interested: http://www.sarugby.co.za/boksmart/pdf/BokSmart%202010-Age%20vs%20Weight%20Category%20Rugby.pdf
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Thanks Sherief. Will definitely take a look at the article.
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hi all nice debate we have used maturity offset on a whole cohort of U15 players in Wales and regressed this against peak power output from a force platform. We have quantified PPO per annual increase in maturity offset and we also managed to break down the data by position because of our large n (n=590). MO was a significant predictor of PPO but intercepts varied by position.
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Very interesting! Thanks for letting us know Prof Stratton.
Are you planning on grouping players based on MO or PPO or not due to the positional differences?
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