Within Youth Academy sporting settings, all athletes have been divided into groupings based on their age. This can be broken into odd or even numbers. Players are segregated from as young as 7 or 8 years old and expected to stay within that grouping until they reach senior age in their chosen sport. An alternative measure to the traditional age groups is the’ Bio-banding’ method.
In essence, Bio-banding is grouping athletes based on their biological age, rather than their chronological age as usually done. It focuses on attributes more commonly associated with growth and maturation as opposed to the generic age of years, months and days appearing on their birth certificate (Cumming et al., 2017). This can have various benefits which will be discussed in more detail further but advocating and enforcing bio-banded ways of organisation of squads can even the playing field, restricting the differences commonly shown within chronological age groups. The differences most commonly are size, strength, and the player’s skill level. Within sports nowadays the widespread need for ready-made talent is at an all-time high. The search for ‘the next best thing’ has never been as hotly contested as the benefits for a sporting organisation to possess such a talent to outweigh the best practices to enable longevity of success for that organisation. Sporting organisations commonly based their inclusion and exclusion factors on a maturity bias towards athletes. This focuses significantly on 3 main factors; the stage of puberty the athlete is going through, the rate of peak height velocity, and the relative age effect of the athlete. Sporting organisations pride themselves on success and want to develop and scout talent that has a greater chance of succeeding at that elite level (Malina et al., 2015). But that is not always the case, in some cases, the effectiveness is not always up to standard and many other factors play their role in talented youths fulfilling their potential, e.g economic and human resources (Votteler & Höner, 2014).
Carrying out bio-banding frameworks has been around for quite some time, most notably in 1995 (Baxter-Jones, 1995). But in recent times has somewhat been ignored until more recently with more and more research as well as sporting organisations embracing the method and implementing it within their youth academy settings. Some sports include basketball (Arede et al., 2021), soccer (Towlson & Cumming, 2022), Australian rules football (Thurlow et al., 2022), and ballet (Mitchell et al., 2021) to name a few.
Even though athletes within a youth academy setting can be of the same chronological age, there can be a massive difference in their biological maturation and their biological age, upwards of several years in some cases. Having this large gap within a group of athletes having to compete against one another can lead to a disservice to both the ‘younger’ and ‘older’ players. This can significantly affect a player’s development throughout the academy process and performance come matchday or within a training session (Cobley et al., 2009; Malina et al., 2015).
When looking at youth sports, in every organisation athletes are biologically categorised into three categories; early maturing, on-time maturing and late maturing. The PAH (percentage of predicted adult stature/height) is the most commonly used estimation status done through sporting academies and is calculated using the Khamis-Roche model (Khamis & Roche, 1994). From this, the maturity offset is estimated. This is an estimation of how far the player is from, or past their peak height velocity. From this result the academy athletes are grouped accordingly into categories; Pre-Pubertal (<85% of PAH), Early pubertal (>85-90% of PAH), Mid-pubertal (90-95% of PAH), and Late pubertal (>95% of PAH).
These terms may not be implemented or taken into consideration in the vast majority of cases but in its purest form bio-banding tries to level the playing field, ensuring whether you are an early, on-time or late maturing player that there is an environment that is created where you can fulfil your full potential both on and off the field of play alongside your peers. Bio-banding is implemented by making changes such as playing early maturing playing against one another, and the same for on-time players and late maturing players with the hope of benefiting all involved (Cumming et al., 2018)
Within a bio-banded tournament structure or training session within a sporting youth academy games are set up to let players flourish as stated above. Pairing players based on their biological age has benefits and can lead to greater success in a long-term pathway. Having players of the same biological age play against one another alleviates the physical dominance players have over one another in many other scenarios. Players will no longer be able to use their physical ability as well as before and must rely on their other abilities such as technical and tactical skills to problem solve and be able to flourish within a session/game. The same goes for other players, the proposed “weaker” players whose physical ability was always diminished because of playing biologically above themselves would now find themselves in a new position of being opposite someone of similar biological age, enabling them to take the technical and tactical skills that they have developed over the years and now incorporate the more physical ability to be able to survive and succeed in the session/game (Cumming et al., 2017).
As mentioned above, Bio-banding is not the new thing on the block, it has been around for many years but with the ever-present growth of sports science and strength and conditioning it has come back into more focus. The early, on-time, and late-maturing athletes all experience puberty at different times throughout their adolescents where their physical, psychological, and social differences may vary drastically. Estimating and being made more aware of this event prior to taking part in their chosen sport can help address any issues that may arise within areas such as training, competition, and talent identification (Cumming et al., 2017)
Training and training load monitoring is becoming more ever present and vitally important within youth academy settings across all sports with the rise and research conducted within strength and conditioning and sports science. The physical capabilities of youth athletes are being more and more developed as time goes on. Whilst within an academy setting your body adapts to any stimuli at all ages even though some physical attributes may be worth focusing more on within certain periods of the player’s growth maturation phase (Lloyd et al., 2015) as well as within a scheduled season the monitoring of the players training and playing load is needed (Johnson et al., 2022). Even prior to the season starting, being aware of the standard of physical characteristics you may be faced with can only improve and aid the decision-making process to help the athlete along their LTAD pathway (MacMaster et al., 2021).
Talent identification is an area that can only benefit from bio-banding and the decrease of the relative age effect (Mann & van Ginneken, 2017). Throughout various sports you see more and more talents being left go and never showcasing their true ability. Enforcing bio-banded measures can help prevent this from happening to ensure more and more athletes develop at their own rate and continue to develop the physical attributes that come closer to adulthood and develop psycho-socially to aid their sporting success rather than being left go because of being ‘not good enough’.
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