My Six Year Old is on the Scholarship Track
Every so often people will find out that I played three sports in high school. Even when I was still in college, 15 or so years ago, I remember being told--with great frequency--how rare it was to see that ‘these days’. Back then I was uneasy by the idea that high school kids were giving up two sports to play one year round, though I can’t really say why other than the fact that if someone was playing only one sport, they were missing out on two others (and isn’t three better than one?). Since then, things have only gotten worse. Below I’ve copied portions of a great article that appeared in the NYT this month about early specialization and added my thoughts:
THE national furor over concussions misses the primary scourge that is harming kids and damaging youth sports in America. The heightened pressure on child athletes to be, essentially, adult athletes has fostered an epidemic of hyperspecialization that is both dangerous and counterproductive.
One New York City soccer club proudly advertises its development pipeline for kids under age 6, known as U6. The coach-picked stars, “poised for elite level soccer,” graduate to the U7 “pre-travel” program. Parents, visions of scholarships dancing in their heads, enable this by paying for private coaching and year-round travel.
Yikes. And before it was bad for a high school kid to focus on one sport.
Children are playing sports in too structured a manner too early in life on adult-size fields — i.e., too large for optimal skill development — and spending too much time in one sport. It can lead to serious injuries and, a growing body of sports science shows, a lesser ultimate level of athletic success. We should urge kids to avoid hyperspecialization and instead sample a variety of sports through at least age 12.
I would highlight ‘at least’ in the previous sentence. Even 12 seems like an early age to be playing a single sport more than 6 months out of the year. Many girls and almost all boys are still growing at this age and still developing and refining higher-level gross motor skills. Engaging in and experiencing a greater number of variables during similar activities will create a more robust ability to perform slightly differing tasks in similar situations, and similar tasks in differing situations.
Nearly a third of youth athletes in a three-year longitudinal study led by Neeru Jayanthi, director of primary care sports medicine at Loyola University in Chicago, were highly specialized — they had quit multiple sports in order to focus on one for more than eight months a year — and another third weren’t far behind. Even controlling for age and the total number of weekly hours in sports, kids in the study who were highly specialized had a 36 percent increased risk of suffering a serious overuse injury. Dr. Jayanthi saw kids with stress fractures in their backs, arms or legs; damage to elbow ligaments; and cracks in the cartilage in their joints.
Because families with greater financial resources were better able to facilitate the travel and private coaching that specialization requires, socioeconomic status turned up as a positive predictor of serious injury. Some young athletes now face surgeries befitting their grandparents. Young hockey goaltenders repeatedly practice butterfly style — which stresses the developing hip joint when the legs are splayed to block the bottom of the goal. The sports surgeon Marc Philippon, based in Vail, Colo., saw a 25-year-old goalie who already needed a hip replacement.
In the Loyola study, sport diversification had a protective effect. But in case health risks alone aren’t reason enough for parents to ignore the siren call of specialization, diversification also provides performance benefits.
Kids who play multiple “attacking” sports, like basketball or field hockey, transfer learned motor and anticipatory skills — the unconscious ability to read bodies and game situations — to other sports. They take less time to master the sport they ultimately choose.
Again, the exposure to different situations will improve the ability to ‘see the field’ and react to different situations. Additionally, this important skill of field and court sports is acquired in a transferable way, whether it is through basketball or lacrosse or soccer.
Several studies on skill acquisition now show that elite athletes generally practiced their sport less through their early teenage years and specialized only in the mid-to-late teenage years, while so-called sub-elites — those who never quite cracked the highest ranks — homed in on a single sport much sooner.
Data presented at the April meeting of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine showed that varsity athletes at U.C.L.A. — many with full scholarships — specialized on average at age 15.4, whereas U.C.L.A. undergrads who played sports in high school, but did not make the intercollegiate level, specialized at 14.2.
We may prize the story of Tiger Woods, who demonstrated his swing at age 2 for Bob Hope. But the path of the two-time N.B.A. M.V.P. Steve Nash (who grew up playing soccer and didn’t own a basketball until age 13) or the tennis star Roger Federer (whose parents encouraged him to play badminton, basketball and soccer) is actually the norm.
I would add that although I don’t think that kids should be specializing in golf at the age of two, Tiger Woods is not a great example. Golf is a sport with a much more controlled environment and a much narrower expression of skill than basketball or tennis. It is more like learning to play a musical instrument, which kids can specialize in early with some success, because it is
1)basically non-reactive, with the absence of other players’ actions affecting your actions; and
2) the risk of overuse injury, while still present (take a look at Tiger’s medical history) is decreased due to the lower levels of force produced.
A Swedish study of sub-elite and elite tennis players — including five who ranked among the top 15 in the world — found that those who topped out at as sub-elites dropped all other sports by age 11. Eventual elites developed in a “harmonious club environment without greater demands for success,” and played multiple sports until age 14.
The sports science data support a “sampling period” through at least age 12. Mike Joyner, a Mayo Clinic physician and human performance expert, would add general physical literacy-building to the youth sports menu: perhaps using padded gymnastics gyms for parkour, which is essentially running, climbing or vaulting on any obstacle one can find.
Remember that aside from the big motor skills developed with parkour or gymnastics or tumbling classes, even the fine motor skills are transferred well. A receiver in football will have 'softer' hands if he spends the spring as a setter for a volleyball team, and the hockey player who can softly receive a passed puck on their stick will be much better at bunting a baseball.
In addition to athletic diversity, kids’ sports should be kid-size.
In Brazil, host of this month’s World Cup, kids are weaned on “futsal,” a lightly structured and miniaturized form of soccer. Futsal is played on tiny patches of grass or concrete or on indoor courts and typically by teams of five players.
Players touch the ball up to five times as frequently as they do in traditional soccer, and the tighter playing area forces children to develop foot and decision-making skills under pressure.
A futsalization of youth sports generally would serve engagement, skill development and health.
USA Hockey (which has barred checking in youth games) recently invited adults to play on a 310-by-130-foot ice rink to show them what it’s like for an 8-year-old to play on a regulation rink. The grown-ups’ assessments: “too much time between the action”; “it’s hard to communicate because everyone is spread out so far”; “you end up spending a lot of time in open space.”
The mention of futsal above brings up another point. The American awareness that Brazilians develop their soccer skills as children comes largely from a book ‘The Talent Code’ by Daniel Coyle, in which he endeavored to discover why certain schools/coaches/teams/neighborhoods produce a disproportionate number of top performers. One of the three keys to developing world-class performance was the need to perform a large amount of ‘deep’ or ‘deliberate’ practice. Futsal not only re-proportions the playing field to a child’s dimensions, but it also allows for many more touches (the ball gets to another player in a lesser amount of time), therefore increasing the amount of 'practice'. Additionally, it alters the expression of the motor skills (the ball is denser and smaller, the surface of the court is hard). Each time a player touches the ball, their nervous system gets better and better at handling it. This has been found to be a major factor in the success of Brazilian soccer, and in fact Coyle presents an example of a Brit who takes started training soccer players using futsal and found unprecedented success. The take home point here is that the diversity of the sport, as well as the increased amount of 'practice' obtained through futsal is the key towards improved performance. Now consider the player on an American club travel team. Assuming they play 9-11 months out of the year, they are spending literally days each year sitting in a car on their way to an out of town tournament, many times spending hours at the tournaments waiting around to play, all time which could be spent playing in games at home, or even better, practicing (people forget that this is where the most touches and experience comes from. It’s impossible to pack the skill development of a few well-designed 10 minute drills into an actual game).
USA Hockey went down this road years ago, focusing on specializing the talented players early, and the number of Americans in the NHL actually began to decrease as a result. They have since changed their approach. The Titleist Performance Institute has created a program called the Cyclone to be used with young children to develop general motor skills rather than just golf technique. We should always remember that the purpose of youth sport is to have fun and develop character, physical capacity and mental toughness. Now science is starting to show that making those values secondary to gunning for a scholarship or traveling team not only loses sight of the big things in life and sport, but also hampers our children's skill development and damages their bodies.