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Relative age effects (RAEs) within sports refer to the overrepresentation of athletes born earlier in the selection year and the underrepresentation of those born later in the selection year. Research examining RAEs in women's and girls' rugby union remains limited in comparison to the male literature, whilst the impacts of RAEs on the youth–senior transition are yet to be explored in a female sport context. As such, the purpose of this study was to examine RAEs during entry into the women's and girls' premiership and international rugby union pathways in England, as well as to compare them to their respective senior cohort (n = 1367): (a) U18 England Rugby Centre of Excellence Player (n = 325) vs. Senior Premiership Player (n = 868), and (b) U18 England Player (n = 49) vs. Senior England Player (n = 125). Chi-square (χ2) analyses compared birth quarter (BQ) distributions against expected distributions. The findings revealed no significant difference in BQ distributions at either youth or senior levels, as well as no significant differences in the BQ distributions of those who were likely to transition from youth to senior levels (all p > 0.05). Importantly, though, descriptive statistics showed a skewed birthdate distribution in both U18 England Rugby Centre of Excellence Player (BQ1 = 30% vs. BQ4 = 20%) and U18 England Player cohorts (BQ1 = 33% vs. BQ4 = 18%). We highlight the gender-specific mechanisms that potentially explain the variations between male and female RAEs in rugby union, including developmental differences, sport popularity, and sociocultural norms. We also warn against a 'copy and paste' template from the male provision to ensure the recent growth of female rugby union does not fall victim to the same RAEs in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relative age effects (RAEs) within sports refer to the overrepresentation of athletes born earlier in the selection year and the underrepresentation of those born later in the selection year. Research examining RAEs in women’s and girls’ rugby union remains limited in comparison to the male literature, whilst the impacts of RAEs on the youth–senior transition are yet to be explored in a female sport context. As such, the purpose of this study was to examine RAEs during entry into the women’s and girls’ premiership and international rugby union pathways in England, as well as to compare them to their respective senior cohort (n = 1367): (a) U18 England Rugby Centre of Excellence Player (n = 325) vs. Senior Premiership Player (n = 868), and (b) U18 England Player (n = 49) vs. Senior England Player (n = 125). Chi-square (χ2) analyses compared birth quarter (BQ) distributions against expected distributions. The findings revealed no significant difference in BQ distributions at either youth or senior levels, as well as no significant differences in the BQ distributions of those who were likely to transition from youth to senior levels (all p > 0.05). Importantly, though, descriptive statistics showed a skewed birthdate distribution in both U18 England Rugby Centre of Excellence Player (BQ1 = 30% vs. BQ4 = 20%) and U18 England Player cohorts (BQ1 = 33% vs. BQ4 = 18%). We highlight the gender-specific mechanisms that potentially explain the variations between male and female RAEs in rugby union, including developmental differences, sport popularity, and sociocultural norms. We also warn against a ‘copy and paste’ template from the male provision to ensure the recent growth of female rugby union does not fall victim to the same RAEs in the future.

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Different ages are closely related especially among the adjacent ages because aging is a slow and extremely non-stationary process with much randomness. To explore the relationship between the real age and its adjacent ages, an age group-n encoding (AGEn) method is proposed in this paper. In our model, adjacent ages are grouped into the same group and each age corresponds to n groups. The ages grouped into the same group would be regarded as an independent class in the training stage. On this basis, the original age estimation problem can be transformed into a series of binary classification sub-problems. And a deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with multiple classifiers is designed to cope with such sub-problems. Later, a Local Age Decoding (LAD) strategy is further presented to accelerate the prediction process, which locally decodes the estimated age value from ordinal classifiers. Besides, to alleviate the imbalance data learning problem of each classifier, a penalty factor is inserted into the unified objective function to favor the minority class. To compare with state-of-the-art methods, we evaluate the proposed method on FG-NET, MORPH II, CACD and Chalearn LAP 2015 databases and it achieves the best performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year of birth is used as a criterion for grouping the competitive categories in various sports. Young players that were born in the early months of the calendar can have a benefit during their formative process, since they have higher chronological age and, consequently, are more likely to be in more advanced stages of biological maturation. The aim of this study was to evaluate the Relative Age Effect (RAE) in the U-20 Libertadores Cup. The sample consisted of 228 young players belonging to 12 clubs (ten different countries) who vied for the championship in the year 2016. The players were distributed according to their playing position: n=24 goalkeepers, n=65 defenders, n=83 midfielders, and n=56 forwards. Data regarding the date of birth were collected and split into quartiles: Q1 (January to March), Q2 (April to June), Q3 (July to September), and Q4 (October to December), and semesters: S1 (January to June), and S2 (July to December). The results showed significant differences corresponding to intra-birth quartiles and playing positions, except for the goalkeeper position. Thus, it is possible to conclude based on the young soccer players participating in an important South American competition that there is a tendency towards the selection of players born in the early months of the relevant year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facial ageing analysis based on 4D data (3D plus time) is much more robust to pose changes and illumination variations than using 2D image and video. The purpose of this investigation was to measure the effects of age and gender related facial changes using dynamic 3D facial scans. Experiments were carried out on the subjects, who were divided into two groups by age (15-30 years and 31-60 years). Each group was further subdivided by gender. 3D scans of the subjects were processed to extract facial features which were tracked through the duration of the data capture. Subsequently, a set of dynamic features were computed from these facial features, as well as static features for comparison. Two-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) of these features demonstrated that statistically significant age and gender related differences could be detected. We show that 3D facial dynamics provide more useful information than static features for the characterisation of smiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children born shortly after the cut-off date applying for age grouping in minor sports profit from being able to remain for almost an additional year in their respective age group compared to those born later in the same year. A shift of the cut-off date in German youth soccer in 1997 allowed us to investigate the effect of a favourable relative age as well as the effect of a change of the cut-off date on the birth-date distribution of soccer players in the Bundesliga (Division 1), the highest professional soccer league in Germany. Both the cut-off date and the change of the cut-off date exerted a significant influence on the composition of professional senior squads. In the 1997/98 season, there was an overrepresentation of players profiting from the old cut-off date of 1 August. In the 2007/08 season, 10 years after the change of the cut-off date, there was an overrepresentation of players born shortly after the new cut-off date of 1 January. This pattern of results shows that owing to the cut-off dates applying in youth soccer, the date of birth of young players systematically influences their later professional success and career. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a replication of studies by Barnsley et al. (1985), and Grondin et al. (1984) the authors gathered birthdates of players in the National Hockey League (NHL), Western Hockey League (WHL), Ontario Hockey League (OHL), and Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL). The players were categorized according to month of birth. Additionally, the players were categorized by country of birth, reflecting the changes in professional hockey over the period since the original studies. The results indicate that despite the globalization of hockey and changes in minor hockey, relative age effect, that is, a strong linear relationship between the month of birth (from January to December) and the proportion of players in the leagues studied, still exists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]