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- [Voiceover] What month did you say your birthday was?
- In June.
It's like June 18th, yeah.
- [Voiceover] Okay.
- What is going on?
What is this video about?
(funky music)
- [Voiceover] Suppose you were born in September.
That would mean your birthday would come
just after the cut-off date for most schools
in the United States.
So if you were 15 on September first,
you would play for the 15 year old team,
even if you were turning 16 on the second.
Studies have shown that this age gap
can give you an advantage, because on average
you're bigger and stronger than the younger competition.
This is called the relative age effect.
Does being born in September make you better at sports?
I'm here at BuzzFeed to find out.
- Patrick was bad at sports.
- (laughs) Kinda, I mean kinda.
I was kinda bad.
- Well, I first broke my nose while doing gymnastics,
and then I broke it again,
because the basketball hit me in the face in gym class.
Maybe I'm not as athletic as I thought
I was as a kid.
- Oh, you know, you know what.
I certainly wasn't the worst.
I wasn't interested in being the best.
If let's say there's 30 kids.
I probably came up seventh.
- Yeah, I was usually pretty,
pretty high up on the
skill level scale (laughs).
I don't wanna sit here and be like,
"I was the best at sports."
But I kinda was.
- In high school I was probably like a four or five.
In elementary school I was probably like a two or a three.
but my heart level was like a 10,
like I believed I could do anything I wanted.
- I was the team captain of my high school tennis team.
I was team captain of my squash team.
I made varsity on football.
I played rugby in college for a while, too.
- [Voiceover] I sent out a survey to BuzzFeed employees
to see what's the highest sports team they ever played for.
According to our study most people quit after high school,
but we actually found that there's three people here
that played professional sports.
Two out of those three people
were born in October and November.
So, maybe your birthday does have an effect,
but we don't know for sure.
(upbeat music)