Parents, it’s essential that your teenager play multiple sports for as long as possible.
The evidence and surveys of kids are overwhelmingly against specialization. Further, the evidence is against any given kid attaining a full-ride athletic scholarship or playing professionally. Potentially worst of all, the evidence strongly supports that kids driven to specialize in hopes of financial return don’t stay in sport at all.
The last point sets us up for a lot of heartbreaks. By forcing a child to pick one sport or by allowing a club system to convince them they have to be all-in all the time, we drive kids to injury, anxiety, or quitting entirely. Even though it is still relevant, playing multiple sports isn’t about diversifying your movement skills or seeking easy transfer of a quality from track & field to the rugby pitch…your child needs to play multiple sports because only the versatile survive.
Specializing Increases Catastrophic Injury Risk, Especially For Girls
Hip and knee injuries requiring surgical repair are more prevalent in menstruating athletes during adolescence than in non-menstruating athletes or in late development. It used to be sport science was so biased and behind that researchers concluded this must be endemic to wider hips and more lax connective tissues associated with an estrogenic hormone profile.
Modern research reaches a simpler, sadder conclusion: girls often play different and fewer sports in youth, then get little to no guidance in strength training, so they have fewer exposures to tissue loading. Thus, social factors that include playing few sports and being poorly prepared for them lead to catastrophic injuries.
These risks aren’t limited to menstruating athletes. Because of repetitive pattern overload from playing a single sport year-round, every young athlete is at risk for overuse injury. Due to a tendency to increase training volume rather than diversify training means, every athlete that specializes early is likely to miss out on progressive, comprehensive, well-rounded athletic development. Specializing early risks breaking your athlete before they reach their potential.
Specializing Early Increases Risk Of Burnout
Mental health issues in young athletes are most often related to the perception that their identity is equivalent to their role in a sport, thus that their worth is equivalent to their performance. With only one sport to focus on, a child may never develop a robust sense of self.
An injury, not making a team, not being selected to start, or not performing up to a coach’s or parent’s expectations can set off a spiral of self-criticism. There is no space for experimentation with sport skills. Even when there is satisfaction with a performance, it is temporary and it is rarely accompanied by real joy. So specializing in a sport early in social-emotional development can stunt the development of the very sense of self sport is meant to help build.
Specializing Limits Athletic Development
Proprioception and rate of learning most strongly correlate to the variety of challenges a person is exposed to and the frequency of those exposures. No matter how dynamic a single sport is, it still mostly consists of predictable patterns. For an athlete limited to a single position within the sport, nearly all of their practice time is spent rehearing a small set of movement patterns from a limited number of starting postures.
After thousands of repetitions of these low-variance patterns, the athlete’s execution becomes rote. Continuing to myelinate the nerves governing that motor pattern makes the pattern more easily accessible, more efficient, and much more resistant to alteration.
Ultimately, this means a young athlete in a single sport learns a few patterns well, then hits a movement quality ceiling that they cannot exceed with additional practice. Specializing in sport at an early age is making the conscious choice to plateau all skill development before other motor skills and athletic qualities like speed and power are fully developed, leaving the athlete behind their peers after adolescence.
Often, The Best Athletes Are Multi-Sport Athletes
And finally, an anecdote: the most successful athletes in my care over the years, being both those who had the highest absolute levels of performance and those who adapted to coaching fastest, had played 4+ sports before I met them. Serious contenders for state titles in track are often top recruits in volleyball, basketball, or football as well.
The value of playing multiple sports is bigger than titles and bigger than recruitment, certainly, as it influences physical, emotional, and mental health in addition to building diverse skills and makes it possible for an athlete to have a long and varied career on any field. But good coaches readily attest – their best athletes often come from some other sport to begin with.
It’s not narrow specialization that makes an athlete great. It’s athleticism. And your athlete is much more likely to reach that level of coordination, adaptability, resilience, and enthusiasm by playing as many sports as they can, as hard as they want, for as long as they like.
Let Your Child Play Multiple Sports
True, I’m here to help your high schooler own their block start, race execution, and hurdle technique…but I’d rather they laughingly wrestle with remembering our warmup after a few months away than they silently wrestle with a confidence crisis after too many months on the track. Interrupting the forgetting, after all, is how learning occurs.
Make sure your athlete is ready to learn by making sure they have plenty of forgetting to interrupt. A kid with too few inputs and too much pressure won’t last long in sports. Only the versatile survive – and I want every athlete to CHOOSE when to walk away, not be forced out.