A test everyone passes has stopped being a test

When a battery stops separating athletes, it stops carrying information, however satisfying the green column looks.

Every player in the squad clears the criterion. The report comes back with a column of green. Somebody calls this a good result, and it is worth pausing on what has actually been established.

A test earns its place by distinguishing. If it returns the same verdict for the strongest athlete and the one who has been struggling since February, it is not measuring anything that varies in your population, and the effort of running it has produced no usable output. This happens to loading criteria constantly, because they tend to be set at a level that a trained adult in a professional environment reaches early in preseason and then never drops below. The bar was placed where a rehabilitating patient might fail. Your squad is not rehabilitating patients.

The ceiling effect also does something worse than waste an hour. It hides deterioration. A player can lose a meaningful chunk of capacity and still clear a low bar, so the test reports no change across the exact months when the change was happening. You would have seen it in the raw score if anyone had kept the raw score, but the pass mark has already thrown the value away and only the verdict is stored.

So keep the number, not the verdict. That is most of the fix, and it costs nothing except a wider spreadsheet. Then look at the spread of the numbers across the squad, and if the spread is small relative to your measurement error, retire the test or make it harder. A single-leg criterion that everyone clears at ten repetitions might separate people at twenty-five with fatigue in the system.

There is a political reason these tests survive long after they have stopped discriminating, which is that they generate reassuring documents. A page of passes is easy to send upstairs and impossible to be blamed for. A test that fails three players every month generates work and argument, and it is also the only one of the two that is telling you anything.

The question to ask of any screening battery, once a year: when did this last change anybody's plan?

If it has not, it is a ritual, and the calendar slot it occupies could be doing something.