We have had similar issues with my son. He is 12 now and skipped one year. He has just finished his first year of high school (Yr 7 here) and is the youngest in the school. He is in a pretty good academic fit and has been selected for most of the advanced classes on offer. However his passion is for sports and being the youngest has impacted on this.
He has still made quite a few school teams (6 in the last 2 years) and has done very well in them but he just missed out on being selected for the advanced sport class (they call it Elite sport and fitness - it is sport therefore it is ok to be elitist!). The main reason he didn't get in was that his test times were not quite as fast as some of the other boys even though some of them are a year to 18months older than him ( a lot of boys are held back around here). He is a late developer too which doesn't help. There can be a HUGE difference between a late developing 12 year old and a 14 yo that has already gone though puberty and their growth spurt.
The school aknowledged that he did extremely well considering his age but they couldn't take that into account as they have to select on results. They do that for all their accelerated classes which means that they are full of pushed high achievers - there are a lot of them in our area - and the underachieving gifted kids miss out - but that is another post altogether!
Apparently next year he is actually able to compete with his agemates in the year below for the big school sports competitions,(there wasn't a lower year this year), but he will always be with his classmates for sports teams and classes.
I do second guess myself at times and wonder if we did the right thing. He would be an outstanding sportman if he was one of the older kids instead of the youngest. He holds his own against the older kids and most of the time I think it is actually helping - giving him challenge and something to strive for instead of always being the best - same as academic acceleration I guess. It is just occasionally when he misses out on something that he would otherwise have probably achieved that it is difficult for him. On the whole I think he is better off where he is.
He does play local sport as well with his age group but even there he is one of the younger ones due to the cut off dates for age groupings. He has been in teams with kids that he went to kinder with who are now a year below him at school. Nobody has said anything to me about it - I don't think it is an issue for anyone.
Good luck with your decision - it is a tough one, we agonised for months before we decided and we still wonder what it is going to be like in years to come.
Cheers
Teri
