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Re: [Phys-L] Girls' High School Basketball.



BTW... what ages were these girls? Now as for your observations: By the phrase "deviating from the mean" do you mean the mean for all girls of those age groups or the mean for all female basketball players? It makes a big difference, especially if the tallest girls were Freshman or Seniors. How did these girls fit into a distribution of all the girls in the school?

On Nov 10, 2014, at 1:41 PM, brian whatcott wrote:

I went to spectate an away basket ball game recently. It was a 'small school' tournament intended to keep the spectrum of player skills comparable. The local school, Blair HS has 89 students. The away team Cheyenne HS has 87 students augmented with 33 students from a smaller school system nearby. Blair was handily beaten by Cheyenne.
The program gave the heights of the Cheyenne players: from 5 ft 2 in to 6 ft 2 in the 18 players involved. Using (rather old) CDC figures for mean female heights at age 18 - mean 64.2 in, SD 2.43 in, I noticed that the tallest girls departed considerably from the mean. This should not be surprising - height is the most important player variable for winning teams.
Listing the most deviant:
one girl 74 inch SDs 4.04
one 72 in SDs 3.21
one 70 in SDs 2.39
one 69 in SDs 1.98
two 68 in SDs 1.56
three 67 in SDs 1.15
The remaining nine players' heights were in the range -0.91 to 0.74 SDs

I was interested to speculate on causes of such unusual heights - even though height is a desirable feature for which players are highly selected.
I asked local opinion for clues. I heard that at least one other school system is known for its winning ways, and I understand that school populations in country towns are NOT drawn from the nation-wide distribution - people in country towns are notably more stationary than townsfolk, so that if there is a genetic strain of tall people in a small town, the trait is likely to persist. (The Dutch are said to have the highest mean heights, for example)
Comments like "it's in the water" or ""they are corn-fed" hint at factors such as hormone analogs and animal growth hormones in the domestic water supply.

This is such a popular topic in high-school statistics, that I mention it here, hoping for further insight. I thought it unlikely that another well-known ruse in competitive sports was in play - the ringer.

Brian Whatcott Altus OK
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