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The issues with specialization in youth sports
At one time, sports were a seasonal pursuit. Hockey, basketball and other indoor sports were reserved for the winter months. As the skies cleared and the temperatures became more accommodating, skates and sneakers were exchanged for cleats, and baseball and soccer were the sports of spring and summer.
Slowly but surely, the youth sport landscape changed. Summer hockey blossomed. Conditioning camps, skating camps, stickhandling schools and other specialized entities were born and hockey became a 12-month a year pursuit. Similar evolution took place in all youth sport.
Youth sports has become big business, and has gone from offering children a chance to participate, compete and develop emotional, physical and mental skills that will help aid their growth toward adulthood, into a fantasy factory, a virtual cottage industry designed to produce professional athletes.
By funneling their children into one sport, parents aren’t allowing their child to experience a normal childhood. Their friends are their sporting teammates, and by pursuing a sport at such a cost of time and energy, they aren’t able to experience and enjoy other aspects of life. They will never hold a summer job, and are unlikely to go away to a summer camp unless it is specifically related to their sport. On top of that, the other children in the family are often left to feel alienated and unloved because so much of family life is devoted to the one child’s never-ending sporting pursuit.
A growing body of research suggests that specialization—the intense, year-round practice of a single activity at the expense of others—is dangerous for the youngest athletes, while picking a sport later on is in fact more likely to lead to an elite athletic career.
What Is the Solution?
We need to return youth sports to the mindset of the past, where there are seasons for sports. Skates are put away in the spring and exchanged for baseball mitts or soccer balls or golf clubs, or all of the above.
Less than one per cent of all youth sport participants will become professional athletes. We must break that image in the minds of parents that they are breeding the next Sidney Crosby or LeBron James and allow their children to experience all that sport has to offer them. The mission of youth sport should not be to create robo athletes pursuing the elusive goal of becoming a pro, but rather to teach kids how to work toward an objective and in many cases, how to work together as a group toward that objective. At the same time, to also recognize at a young age the value of regular exercise in pursuit of an overall healthy lifestyle.
While knowing that multi-sport athletes make for better performers and more well-rounded people, how do we get that message into the minds of parents who are convinced the only way to make their kid a hockey star is by playing all-hockey, all the time? And how do we alter the thinking of coaches who want their players devoted to the team and the sport 24/7, 12 months a year?
We will do so by talking about the campaigns being launched by national sports organizations emphasizing the benefits of playing sports other than theirs, and through the voices of key players in the industry and how they look for athletes first and sport-specific stars second. And we will also show how playing a multitude of sports growing up makes for a more well-rounded person by speaking with people who’ve succeeded in both sports and in other aspects of life while following this blueprint.
Give And Go Sport Education aims to educate and expand opportunity for youth athletes by showcasing the value of multi-sport exposure.
