Vaulting toward the Mean

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Steve Sailer shares an anecdote about vaulting toward the mean:

When I was at Notre Dame High School, our archrival Crespi always killed us in pole vaulting during our annual track meet. In fact, Crespi vaulters set a whole bunch of different national age group and high school year records.That’s pretty amazing. Strangely enough, it becomes less amazing when you discover that all three star Crespi vaulters were named Curran. It turns out that the Curran brothers had a pole vault track and pit in their backyard, where their father, who had been a pole vaulter, trained them in advanced pole vaulting techniques.

Here’s a one minute video from a Super Eight home movie from around 1972 of seventh-grader Anthony Curran clearing 9 feet in his backyard. I had always imagined ever since I read in the 1970s about the Curran family pole vaulting practice ground that they were very rich and had a huge back yard with an Olympic Stadium type set-up, but the video shows it’s cramped, ramshackle, and the pit consists of old mattresses right in front of a brick wall. It looks like a good place to break your neck. I’m sure no modern upper middle class mom would put up with Dad and the boys building such a nightmare in the backyard, but Mrs. Curran can be seen waving happily in the home movie as her 13-year-old son hurtles toward his fate.

Not too surprisingly, the Curran Brothers were quite good pole vaulters in college (Anthony Curran, now the pole vault coach at UCLA, has an all-time personal best of 18′-8″), but they weren’t the record setters in their subsequent careers that they had been in high school. I don’t think any Curran’s ever made the U.S. Olympic team. Regression toward the mean set in as they got older and better natural athletes started to catch up to them in hours of lifetime training.

Say you were the college pole vault coach of the Curran Brothers and the athletic director said to you, “Tim Curran set a world age group record at 15, Anthony Curran sent national class year records in high school for sophomore, junior, and senior years. We recruited you the two most accomplished high school vaulters in the history of the top pole vaulting state in the Union. But under your coaching, they aren’t even winning college national championships. Why are you failing so badly with all this talent we gave you?”

The true answer is that because the Currans started training so much younger than their current competitors in college, they came closer to fulfilling 100% of their natural potential in high school than anybody else in California did. Now, the other kids are catching up and regression toward the mean is kicking in for the Currans. As high schoolers, the Currans had good nature and exceptional nurture to dominate an obscure sport. By college, they were running into competitors with even better nature, and the nurture gap was closing as all the top competitors got the same amount of coaching in college.

His real concern is measuring teacher effectiveness, but that’s not obvious unless you read the whole thing.

Leave a Reply