By Howie Lindsey
Buck The Trend:
Let Your Kids Play ALL
The Sports
When you hear the word
diversity what comes to mind?
Skin tones? Political opinions? Socio-
economic class?
Let’s add another: Athletics.
And no, for this article we aren’t addressing
the importance of racial or cultural diversity
within athletics teams, but rather the need
for athletes to experience diversity in training
methods and sports as they mature.
In covering college athletics for more than a
decade, there are few words that elicit such a
negative response as this one: Specialization.
What is specialization? Specialization,
specifically sport specialization, is the
increasingly common trend of young athletes
picking one particular sport and training for
that sport year-round. A nine-year-old seems
to be particularly good at throwing a baseball
so they work on pitching for 10-20 hours per
week for the next eight straight years.
With the potential for millions of dollars
in professional contracts on the line, it is
tempting for parents to become hyper-focused
on a particular sport or activity for their child.
Personal trainers are hired, camps are hyper-
focused and the young athlete’s trajectory as a
collegiate star is set in steel much like a freight
train on the track heading toward a particular
destination.
Anecdotal – and scientific – evidence suggests
that specialization may be a mistake. College
coaches will tell you the same.
Dozens of coaches at the elite college level
– coaches like Louisville football coach Bobby
Petrino, soccer coach Karen Ferguson-Dayes,
baseball coach Dan McDonnell – not only have
a distaste for sport specialization, they seem to
prefer athletes who don’t specialize.
32 EXTOL SPORTS / JUNE 2017
Longtime NFL veterans Eric Wood (Buffalo
Bills) and Breno Giacomini (Houston Texans)
came to Louisville as two-sport high school stars,
playing basketball each winter after football
season was complete. Former Louisville stars
Michael Bush and Brian Brohm played three
sports in high school. Bush now has a single-
digit handicap in golf and is a ridiculously
good bowler.
Minnesota Timberwolves center Gorgui Dieng
has been praised for his elite foot quickness for
a 7-footer, and Dieng directly credits his youth
as a soccer player.
Some of the best skill position players in
Louisville’s current football program also ran
track to increase speed and body-awareness. In
women’s soccer and rowing, the top athletes are
almost always multi-sport stars in high school.
And it’s not just Louisville coaches who
prefer multi-sport athletes. At the professional
level, we frequently hear pro coaches praise an
athletes body awareness and balance, typically
crediting participation in multiple sports other
than their current profession.
How big of an issue is sport specialization?
The NBA, led by NBA Vice President Kiki
VanDeWeghe and NBA Director of Sports
Medicine John DiFiori, published an op-ed
in USA Today essentially encouraging kids to
play something other than just basketball: “So
what can we do about a youth sports culture
that increasingly pressures boys and girls to
play one sport year-round and causes parents
to feel that their child will be left behind if they
don’t go along? For starters, young athletes
should ... be exposed to multiple sports. ...Avoid
playing a single sport competitively year-round
... and focus on skills development rather than
structured competition.”
That sentiment distilled in its simplest form?
Diversity is best.
Medicine agrees. In a paper published in 2013
in the Sports Health discipline in the National
Library of Medicine, a group of five doctors led
by Neeru Jayanthi concluded: “For most sports,
there is no evidence that intense training and
specialization before puberty are necessary to
achieve elite status.”
Further, that study found “Risks of early sports
specialization include higher rates of injury,
increased psychological stress, and quitting
sports at a young age.”
There are certainly many examples of child
prodigies who become superstar pros - golfers
like Tiger Woods and Ricky Fowler, dozens
of tennis stars, figure skaters and, of course,
gymnastics.
But a 2007 study of 4,000 Olympic athletes
found that the average starting age in their
chosen sport was 11.5 years old. That’s after some
American families have made the decision to
forgo all other sports and concentrate on one
particular sport.
A study of 708 minor league professional
baseball players showed that although their
mean starting age was 6 years old, the players’
mean age of specializing in baseball was 15 years.
The majority (52 percent) didn’t concentrate on
baseball full time until the age of 17.
As a parent, you can take two things from
all this:
1. Your fifth-grader can pick up a new sport
tomorrow and still be an Olympian.
2. To be a success at the college or professional
level, you do not need to play one sport year-
round throughout high school.