I think it comes down to the question you’re trying to answer. In the context of recruitment, comparing an athlete to norms from your own cohort can be useful. And when you consider how trainable the qualities you’re looking at are you get a sense of where someone is now vs where they could get to. Once the athlete is in your environment, norms become less useful. Here, it makes more sense to focus on their individual baseline and track changes over time. As with anything, you still need apples to apples regardless the context to start with.