By Melissa Woods
November 17th 2009 @ 2:14am
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Why some areas produce more sports stars
Researchers are attempting to uncover the why behind Wagga Wagga – the NSW country town that has produced a swag of sporting champions.
Queensland’s Griffith University is leading research into identifying potential elite athletes, which could be the key to improving Australia’s international sporting success.
Rather than the standard biophysical measures, the university hopes to uncover reasons [...]
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Kurt said | November 17th 2009 @ 2:51am | Report comment
All very interesting stuff but this sounds a little like the discussions around ‘cancer clusters’. Our limited human brains naturally expect random events to be evenly distributed, and when they are clustered we look to explain this with reference to factors such as overhead power lines & mobile phone towers. In fact random events with similar probability occurring across a sufficiently large population (i.e. certain types of cancer, the chances of being an elite athlete) almost always show up as ‘clusters’ with cases grouped together and large areas of ‘blank’ space in between.
So if there wasn’t a ‘Wagga effect’, there would be a ‘Mildura effect’ or ‘Cootamundra effect’ or some other explanation for what may be an entirely random occurrence.
bever fever said | November 17th 2009 @ 8:15am | Report comment
The Wagga effect happens because their is no beach in Wagga, Canberra is the same plenty of sports stars in all codes and sports for a relatively small place.
No surfing stars from Wagga, plenty from Newcastle, Central coast up to QLD.
The beach gets a lot of kids involved especially boys who can use up all that energy surfing rather than playing footy etc.
Wagga is on the so-called Barassi line and all footy codes are reasonably strong.
This is why Wagga is a hotspot, this is what this reseach will tell us.
Any large inland town will be the same.
M1tch said | November 17th 2009 @ 10:03am | Report comment
what else is there to do, but play sport?
danny said | November 17th 2009 @ 10:05pm | Report comment
ensure the survival of the bogan race