27/07/2026
Comin in Hot with an overview of the NYS Advanced Placement for Athletics tests.
You really must be profoundly ignorant or a special kind of stupid to think this is both valid and a good idea. My hope is to raise some awareness to the charade of stupidity that we continue to go along with for the past 50 years.
Steps to be completed in the process:
1. Administrative Request and Permission
2. Medical/Physical Maturity Assessment (profoundly wrong)
3. Physical Fitness Testing (a one size fits all, inadequate, and invalid)
4. Final Determination: Tryouts, coach’s call
Reasoning behind the tests:
1. To ensure that athletes are competing at the correct level.
2. To ensure safety for the athletes; namely that they epiphyseal plates have not stopped maturing.
Let’s start with the Physical Test. It is made up of 5 tests:
1. Curl-ups (situps; core strength)
2. Shuttle run (speed/agility)
3. One Mile Run (cardio endurance)
4. Pullups (upper body strength)
5. Sit and reach (flexibility)
An athlete must pass 4 of the 5 to pass the test. Let’s start there.
If you have a 280lb 8th grade manchild that wants to play jv football they are not passing the mile, or the pullups, and the sit and reach, curl ups, and shuttle run are all in question. If that same kid benches 225lbs and squats 315, is it safer for them to play against 100lb kids on modified?
If you have a 7th grade swimming phenom, are any land-based tests better than just putting them in the pool and getting their times in events and then comparing them to JV and V times?
But Sarge, those are outliers. Well, first off the test is meant for outliers. Second, take for instance the basketball player who will be engaging in physical contact with probably larger adolescents. It seems good for testing them right? WRONG. Most injuries of substance will occur from eccentric contractions and ground reactionary forces from cutting and jumping. So I ask, if you make the middle schooler play against his own grades, do you think he/she won’t cut as hard or jump as high? Is he/she less likely to come down on a foot? Less likely to tear an ACL because of cutting? NO.
The test does not make sports safe. Does it have some validity when grading the athleticism of the athlete? SURE. But you know what’s a better indication? Playing the sport versus those that they will move up and play against.
If you take bp for 2 weeks and can’t touch a jv pitcher, maybe you aren’t ready. But if you fail all 5 tests and bat .400 during tryouts, maybe those tests aren’t valid.
But here’s where I really go off the rails. Even if you pass the physical test, you still have to pass the Tanner Test of Physical Maturity. It was created in the 1960’s by a British pediatrician measuring height, weight, muscle mass, and P***C HAIR.
The rating system for the Tanner Test is a 1-5 scale as follows:
1. Prepuberty: no hair
2. Breast buds or testicular enlargement, sparse p***c hair
3. Growth in breasts/ge****ls, coarser p***c hair
4. Adult like changes like larger areolas or p***s growth
5. Full adult maturity
Mind you, the Tanner Test was made before the advent of lifting weights and Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds grew their foreheads and showed us that in all sports, weightlifting can mitigate to some degree our given physical limitations with work in the weightroom and with plyometrics and agility drills. Otherwise, we must ask ourselves why every professional team and every Division I team in America hires strength and conditioning coaches.
In 1993, as an 8th grader I was asked to try out for jv basketball. After passing the physical test* I then was called down to the nurse’s office during a class period. There was a dr. and the school nurse. They took my height and weight and asked me to take off my shirt. Then the nurse said, “Usually we just check the underarms”. I had no idea what they were talking about. Then she left the room, and an Indian doctor whom I never met told me to drop my pants. I did. He stared at my ge****ls. He then told me to pull my pants back up and exited the room. That was the Tanner Test. I passed.
Now I ask you, what the hell was that Tanner Test going to tell my possible jv basketball coach that he wouldn’t know from tryouts? Especially given that the jv basketball coach WAS MY DAD.**
With all the weirdness that has been uncovered in the last several decades from priests to islands dealing in pe******ia, can we see how it might be a bad idea for strangers to be looking at the genitalia of our children? Should we be sending our kids in a room alone with an adult whose job is to then look at their genitalia? Aren’t we supposed to protect our children from this type of personal invasion? WHY DO WE ACCEPT THIS?
Furthermore, does p***c hair give us a better indication than a physical test? What’s the ratio of p***c hairs to age that indicates the closing of growth plates? How many hairs are needed to go from stage 2 to 3? Are we going to have these doctors or nurses count p***c hairs?
What’s more is the hypocrisy in testing between females and males. As told by many female athletes, “they just ask if we started our period and you can lie about that”. I guess we’re only counting male p***c hairs now?
The Tanner Test is an antiquated test that analyzes symptoms in an attempt to make a guess about the athlete’s ability to absorb forces in the skeleton and soft tissues. P***c hair measures NOTHING. We have quantifiable mass to strength measurements, bodyweight exercises, speed tests, endurance tests, and quantifiable inarguable weights that we could use, but instead the Tanner Test uses a medical professional that needs no understanding of the sport, the weight room, or the individual athlete to make subjective decisions based on P***C HAIR.***
It should be noted, that even if you pass the physical test but fail the Tanner Test, you still fail and cannot play jv or v sports. Make it make sense.
The solution? Steps 1 and 4 of the Advanced Placement Process. Administrative sign off where a coach has told the athletic director that they want specific athlete(s) to try out and they have discussed as the 2 see fit. Then they tryout. If the coach wants to incorporate some physical tests for that athlete, that should be their prerogative. The Tanner Test should be abolished, as should the physical test as its one size fits all is antithetical to the very outliers it tests.
I hope this ticks you off as much as it ticks me off as I have been sitting on these thoughts for YEARS and only during the 2025-26 basketball season did I come to a boiling point where I knew I needed to bring this to light.
*There’s no way I passed the physical test. Mr. Pinkerton just knew that it had nothing to do with my ability to play basketball. I was short on the broad jump by about a foot and was carrying a grown man’s ass at 12 years old that made it impossible for me to run fast enough in the 100m sprint. He looked at his stop watch and asked me if I felt faster today. Not really. Well you were. And you jumped further too. That’s when I knew the gig was up. Both those tests are no longer included.
**In his infinite wisdom, it should be noted that my dad asked me to try out for jv basketball. This was at a time when there were 25-30 people trying out. First cuts were after practice on Wednesday and the final cut was on Friday. I got the ax from my own dad on Friday. Did this cause some tension in the house? Well, I’ll never forget my dad muttering about their record and my mom telling him it was because his best point guard was on the couch getting ready for modified practice.
***You can get pi**ed off at this if you want, but doctors all took a very public test to show us how smart and in touch with their patients they were during COVID. I have yet to hear or see all of the dead teenage bodies. Conversely, I can point to plenty of females with POTS and males with Myocarditis that I have dealt with either at 3 S or at Potsdam State. The letters at the end of their name do not mean I will hold them with the same deference as years gone by and I will not take part in this appeal to authority.
