What are we doing to our Children?

What are we doing to our children?

                I had a conversation with a fellow athletic trainer the other day about the long term effects of specializing our youth athletes so early. I would like to highlight the important take-a-ways from our hour long conversation.

-          Sports are still new. Many people may thing I am crazy for saying this but I would like you to really think about how old popular sports are. Just think, there was racial segregation in some sports. The popularity of High School sports is fairly new. 20 years ago, no one really cared if you were a star quarterback on your football team. It was cool, but it didn’t guarantee a free education. Now the stakes are blown out of proportion.  Sports, to some, are the only way they will get to school and for others it will open doors for them that they could not reach academically.  This is a whole new beast and something many have not realized.

 

-           Personally my parents knew nothing about high school sports. In their day, it was just a hobby. Now it has become a lifestyle. The parents now pushing their kids like crazy are the ones who played sports as youth, and felt like they could have done better if they were pushed. Many of the parents are former, college or high school “stars” in sports.  But lets look at the numbers. In the 1960’s I can bet that there were not 40 girls from one school trying out for a varsity soccer team.  Now that is common place. The level of competition has risen and some parents need to understand that if they played now, they would be sitting the bench or not even make the team. Your best basketball player in the 60’s would get crushed if they stepped on an NBA floor now. So we cannot compare then and now. Youth sports have become a whole new world.

 

-          There are NO long term longitudinal studies. NO REARCH has been done on this topic, because it is to new. What I mean is, if you make your child play ONLY baseball from the age of 10, we have ZERO studies to see what his quality of life will be at 50. He could be unable to lift is child out of bed because his shoulder might pop out of place.  Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit but maybe I’m not, the truth is there is nothing to prove I am right or wrong. I have athletes that are 16 and 17 going on their second knee surgery. How well do you think they will be walking and moving at 65? We have no clue. We do not know any long term issues with doing a sport for too long. Just look at all of the concussion research.  

 

-          BURNOUT! I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that this is a real issue with youth athletes. Many kids I have worked with have LOST the passion for their sport. They are only doing it to keep a scholarship or because they are naturally good at the sport and will get a scholarship for it if they stay with it. The fun is gone, the passion is gone, the love for the game is gone. It has become a full time job for them.  Think about your job or career now, if you have been working for 10+ years. Do you still enjoy getting up and going to work? Or do you just do it because you have to provide for your family? Now let’s look at a kid at the age of 10 only playing one sport all year round. How do you think that kid will feel about that sport at age 18? That is 8 years dedicated to success at one thing. By the time they reach that point they will probably hate the sport. 

 

-          GENETICS! I have highly recommended that everyone go out and buy the book “The Sports Gene”. You will learn a ton about how important genetics is in sports. Here is why its sooooo important for youth sports. Your son/daughter may grow or mature faster than their peers. In middle school they may be the best basketball player in the school because they are bigger and faster than the other kids.  However, they have stopped growing. Once they hit high school other kids pass them and are a way bigger than them. Now they are no longer the star of the show, they may not even see any playing time because they are too small to compete. This is one of the saddest things I have to watch sometimes. An athlete goes from being the best to not even making the team because they were not blessed with the right genes. It’s sad but true, there is nothing we can do about this. You can increase your skill and work very hard but if you are 5’2” and the starting guard is 6’2” with equal talent, chances are the bigger kid will play. We can’t choose our parents so we have to learn to be happy and do the best we can with what we got.

 

These were just some of the topics we touched on, but there are so many more. Youth sports have become a HUGE market and with any boom in participation there is a boom in the money that can be made. With the dollar signs starting to come in, we are seeing every idiot who use to play “professional” sports; hold a camp, coach a team, or run some workshop.  Let’s not lose sight of the MOST IMPORTANT THING, the safety and happiness of our children. They are not trophies to be put on a shelf and bragged about at the town barbeque. Our job is not to make them the greatest athlete of all time, our job is to make them great people so that they will succeed in life and be happy. Sports are a way to teach people about life, not a life in and of itself.