Pick your daughter’s future sport based on her expected body type (height and weight)

Or, “How to get your five-year old recruited into Stanford or Harvard for sports in 2027”…Or, “It helps to be tall”

There’s so much talk these days about early sports specialization, the idea that your child needs to pick very early on which sport they will focus on in order to put in the 10,000 hours (or more) to become a master of that sport. Baseball and basketball travel teams seem to start at ever-earlier ages, and it may be tough to catch up to the other kids if yours miss out on these teams. While the best sport is probably the one your child is most passionate about, what if we could build a spreadsheet that could point out which sport they might be more likely to succeed in based on their future predicted body type?

In this example spreadsheet, we’ll plot a child’s future expected height and weight against the heights and weights of the top female US athletes in sports that are played in college. The goal of the spreadsheet is to roughly point out which sports best fit our entered body type.

Spreadsheet Inputs:

1.  Heights and weights of top female athletes for college varsity sports. First, we get our list of women’s sports via Stanford’s website. Note, Harvard notably has hockey in addition to most of these sports:

Then we search the internet for heights and weights. Luckily, many of these sports are played in the Olympics. We found a treasure trove of data at Sports-reference.com, which has height and weight information for each of the US athletes for all of the sports for many past Olympics.

We then enter in this information into a spreadsheet for all of the college varsity sports:

Note: we couldn’t find any weight information for many of the golfers and couldn’t find much of any body type information for the current top ranked squash players. We didn’t put in track and field/cross country given the diversity of events and difficulty of matching. We also used the top 10 female professional tennis players instead of the US 2012 Olympic tennis players to get more data. The softball data is from the 2008 team given they took softball off the list in 2012.

2. Child’s predicted future height: Babycenter has a tool to predict a child’s future height based on their current height and parents’ height:

Spreadsheet Output

Okay, data is entered, child’s height predicted, time to build the output graph!

There’s really not much to it, first create a Scatterplot. We’ll put Heights on the x-axis and Weights on the y-axis. Then we want to insert a separate series for each different sport, so that they show up on the graph with different markers:

The result looks like the below (we added some purple glow to your child’s predicted height and weight to make it stand out…looks like it might be soccer or field hockey for this future 5’6 and 140 pound hypothetical athlete…she might have to bulk up to play hockey or grow another 5 inches to play basketball):

We can add a filter on our data to just look at certain sports: let’s try all “goal-based” sports. We learned something new – height is pretty important in water polo:

Try the spreadsheet out for yourself! Or try building the men’s sports version!

Spreadsheet: Pick your daughter’s sport based on body-type