This is part 2 of Mara White’s perspective on sport’s specialization.  Mara is a current track coach and former athlete of mine.  This is a great read.  Please take the time to read it to its entirety.  It has great personal insight on what specialization did to her and what she thinks would have happened had she continued to diversify.

For starters, simply from a training perspective it is beneficial for our kids’ fitness and physical health if we allow them to stay varied in the sports they dedicate their time to.  It is not an unknown fact that doing the same things and working the same muscles, and the same systems over, and over, and over again is not a good thing.

You aren’t going to wear a kid out or injure them in any faster way than drilling them consistently over the course of the year.  Allowing our kids to use different parts of the year to work different parts of their bodies is only a good thing.

Had I stuck with basketball and spent my winter working lateral/stability muscles it would have only made my body more resistant to injury in the spring.  Had I stuck with basketball for just a couple more years and continued to work on my strength and my vertical jump it would have only made me more explosive on the track.  

As another example, I hear over and over again about the football coach that refuses to allow his players to participate in track in the spring.  It is one of the most consistently ridiculous phenomena in high school sports.  There is a huge pressure for high school boys to devote their entire year to either conditioning for or playing football.

In my opinion there are few things better a football player can do to increase his explosiveness, speed, strength, agility, etc. than learning to explode out of blocks in a 100m or by throwing the shot.  I also don’t think this fact is actually entirely lost on football coaches either (it’s really quite obvious), but I’ll get to that later.         

Besides the physical aspects, it is asinine for us to expect children (which is exactly what freshmen, sophomores and juniors are) to dedicate the entirety of their focus and dedication to one single area.  4 years in high school is a long time, and 4 more years in college is even longer and we as adults and coaches need to be more aware of this fact and quit expecting so much for so long.  

We have to be more concerned about the longevity of our kids both physically and mentally.  If a kid has another area of his or her life that they love then we need to foster that and allow them to divert their attention, for their own wellbeing.

I can guarantee that allowing your athletes to spend some time more focused on other things in the off season is only going to make them better athletes during your season.  Even if that means you as the coach have to adjust your training a bit to accommodate your multi-sport athlete in the short run, it will pay off in the long run.  Patience is a virtue, even as a coach.

If we really want to slow down this specialization phenomenon, we need to find the root of why it is happening.  In my opinion at the crux of this whole issue are really selfish adults.  Every coach wants to win and more and more coaches are asking for kids to devote so much of themselves to their teams in a way that they feel is necessary to increase their chances of winning.

The intensity of youth sports is only increasing and this pressure seems to be forcing kids into treating the game that they play like a job way, way too early.

Stay tuned for part 3 next week.

Photo courtesy of Oscar Rethwill on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rethwill/