http://www.jsonline.com/sports/prep/jul05/339942.asp
Single-minded focus can blur reality for athletes
Putting emphasis on one sport can be unhealthy, expensive
Posted: July 9, 2005
Passion always has been the lifeblood of high school sports.
With no money going to athletes and coaches earning a pittance of a salary, the pride of winning, the pain of losing - and the lessons that went along with both - were all that mattered at the end of the day.
The excitement of competition has fueled an explosion in the popularity of prep sports over the last decade, and the numbers show no signs of decreasing.
But as the profile of high school sports has risen, so have the stakes of each game, match, tournament and meet.
For some, what was once mere passion for sports at the high school level has turned into an obsession.
College scholarships are supposedly on the line.
Children feel as if they must compete to satisfy overzealous parents, some of whom have spent thousands of dollars on their athletic development.
Coaches depend heavily on certain athletes to perform at a high level in their teams' quest for championships.
And the student-athletes, who sometimes depend on sports for their identity and self-worth, may take losses especially hard or cannot enjoy a victory because they had a sub-par day.
So the parents, the coaches and the kids search desperately for something that will provide an edge.
The most popular option has become specialization, a growing trend in which student-athletes play the same sport year-round.
They hop from club teams to the varsity team and back to the club teams, often without more than a week of rest before the next "season" begins.
On the flipside, multi-sport athletes have become a dying breed.
The time commitment needed to compete in private youth sports clubs, especially at the elite level, makes it difficult to take up additional activities.
Some of it has to do with individual choice, as kids realize they have a special talent and want to improve.
But for many student-athletes, external pressure from parents and coaches steers them in a direction they may or may not want to go. Everyone wants to be the best, and adults are stopping at nothing to make sure it happens for the children under their watch.
"Kids, no matter what era, are striving to really be good at their sport. Where it has changed, obviously, has been with the adults and the parents," said Doug Gardner, a sport psychology consultant for ThinkSport, based in Lafayette, Calif., who also has worked for the Boston Red Sox.
"When the sport itself becomes more of a job than it is about fun and improvement and getting better, once that line gets crossed, it's hard for kids to understand. Kids don't understand what they're getting into because it's a business model. These are adults running all of this stuff, and kids aren't used to such a cut-throat business. They want to play their sport. They're not used to the stakes involved that a lot of adults have created."
Not only is the health of high school sports programs threatened by the specialization trend, the health of the student-athletes themselves might also fall into jeopardy.
Warning signs abound from pediatricians and trainers about specializing too early - overuse of muscles, over-stress on joints and mental fatigue - are largely being ignored.
Instead, the focus is on signing a letter of intent for a full-ride scholarship or the euphoria of winning a state championship, which many believe can happen only through extensive experience in a single area.
"The problem is not so much the single-sport athlete as it is all of these things going year-round," said David Leigh, assistant clinical professor and athletic trainer at Marquette University. "I think we had fewer injuries when it was a dual-sport or triple-sport athlete. The body would adapt to (the) different stresses to it. Therefore, the injuries wouldn't be as great, even though they were playing three sports."
Success is no longer measured by how well student-athletes develop, but through individual statistics and team records in the varsity season, and what they are doing in the off-season to prepare for the next varsity season.
Despite the move toward specialization and winning-at-all-costs at the prep level, the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association has resisted jumping on board.
"The emergence of the non-school opportunities now, on a select basis for elite athletes, has gotten more publicity and more attention," said Doug Chickering, executive director of the WIAA. "That factors in from our perspective, an educational-based program, why we don't want to indicate that we don't want people to be successful, we also want to make programs as available to as many students as we possibly can and not just serve the elite."
Every sport affected
Specialization has affected every aspect of the prep sports landscape, from how parents pick schools to how coaches coach and, ultimately, how kids play.
In previous generations, sports involvement among children came from two sources: school-sponsored sports and spontaneous play at parks and, in cities, on the asphalt.
In school-sponsored sports, varsity athletes moved from the fall season to the winter season and finally to the spring before taking summers off.
About the only non-school organized sponsored sports available were Little League and American Legion baseball and Pop Warner football.
Multi-sport athletes were viewed as heroes, a concept forever immortalized by author Clair Bee's fictional series on Chip Hilton, the all-American sports star. Not all children were as athletically gifted as the Chip Hilton prototype, but sports - albeit unorganized - were definitely part of their lives.
Spontaneous play in suburban areas usually consisted of baseball, touch football and backyard basketball. As for cities, there were the time-honored favorites, "kickball" and "stickball," as well as basketball on neighborhood courts that drew dozens of players and spectators.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, youth leagues sprouted as an alternative for ultra-talented athletes to improve their skills.
Specialized training had readily been available in Olympic-style sports like gymnastics and wrestling. Only a handful of athletes were picked out at an early age and tagged as "elite."
Now it was just as accessible in team sports like basketball and volleyball, both quite popular nationwide.
Demographics changed significantly in the 1990s, resulting in more disposable income for things like youth leagues and traveling teams.
According to the U.S. Census, the median household income soared from $29,442 in 1989 to $43,771 in 1999.
Urban sprawl accelerated, and families moved farther and farther apart. The possibility of spontaneous sports activities among children was greatly reduced.
Violence increased in cities, which made being outdoors, let alone playing pick-up basketball at the court, much less safe for fear of stray bullets or getting caught up in gang warfare.
So what was once considered "child's play" was turned over to organized youth leagues holding organized games.
Starting young
Children can begin playing in youth leagues as young as 5 years old in Milwaukee Kickers, a s****r club that serves about 14,000 kids in the Milwaukee area.
Milwaukee Sting, the state's most prominent volleyball club, begins sponsoring teams at 11-and-under.
"Kids don't even get the chance to play that sport that they play just on their own or with friends," Gardner said. "It's always in a structured environment. It's always a travel tournament."
Very few youth leagues turn children away. Yet before kids reach middle school, they are separated into different groups, with designations such as "Gold" and "Red" or "1s" and "2s."
The designations are often by skill level, not geography or random placement.
Take, for instance, "recreational s****r" and "select s****r." Most children begin in recreational s****r, which consists of one practice per week, one game per week and guaranteed playing time.
Select s****r takes the sport to another level.
It involves daily practices, several games per week and extensive travel. Playing time is not guaranteed on select teams and players can be cut at any time.
Parents face decisions
Dave Uhrich, men's and women's track and cross country coach at Marquette University, reached the point where his 10-year-old son, Steffen, was eligible to try out for select s****r. The year-round commitment it would require made the Uhrich family leery of how it would affect Steffen's athletic development.
"We didn't even try (him) out for the select s****r just because I didn't want him specializing so much at such a young age," Uhrich said. "He likes s****r, but he likes baseball, basketball, running, golf. If he had gone into select s****r, that would have made it a lot more difficult to do these other sports. I thought, and he thought, at 10 years old, he didn't want to start specializing that much at such a young age."
For those who choose to go on with the specialization as adolescents, and eventually as high school students, several factors come into play.
The most obvious is the athletic scholarship to pay for college.
Skyrocketing tuition and the prestige of sports are driving many parents and kids, regardless of economic status, to go for athletic aid rather than academic aid.
The more that student-athletes play a particular sport, they believe, the better off they'll be skill-wise and the more attention they'll attract from college coaches.
"There are dreams, perhaps somewhat unreasonable or unattainable, about scholarships that I think influence kids and parents that also make them feel that specializing at an earlier age will make those types of grants available," said the WIAA's Chickering.
High school coaches also play a role in specialization.
Some coaches, under the ever-increasing pressure to win, encourage or even demand that students take part in certain off-season activities to better themselves for the next season.
Student-athletes join Amateur Athletic Union or club teams in their main sport, but must often abandon their second or third varsity sport because of time constraints.
And the perceived benefits may not come to fruition.
"If you've got these kids playing in these elite travel teams, they come into it and it's purely about competition, a very cut-throat, win-at-all-costs mentality. There is no guarantee of development," Gardner said. "It's just an opportunity to be seen and an opportunity to play against the best, but it doesn't mean you're being taught anything."
Some push too hard
The most disheartening aspect is the push by parents to turn marginal athletes into megastars through excessive, and often costly, individual training at sports medicine clinics.
"What's happening - and I'm not saying this against my profession - is the parents are driving that," said Leigh, the Marquette athletic trainer. "My kid's not fast enough, so I want him to get faster. OK, we can make them faster. Some of that is from parents wanting their kid to get a scholarship, so they're going to send them to this clinic or this performance-enhancement person and we're going to run these speed camps. It's a capitalistic system."
Experts agree the effects of specialization over time can be disastrous.
According to the National SAFE Kids Campaign, more than 3.5 million children age 14 and under receive medical treatment for sports injuries each year.
The organization also states that overuse injury, a result of repeated motion over time, is responsible for nearly half of all sports injuries to middle school and high school students.
"When you play the same sport over and over again, it leads to more overuse injuries," said Greg L. Landry, a pediatrician and University of Wisconsin professor. "One of the advantages of changing sports is that you use different muscles and different forms of exercise, which gives some parts of the body some rest.
"Kids need variety and they need down time. (When) they have a lot of physical complaints, headaches, stomach aches, any time they come in with an injury that doesn't get better, sometimes that means they may need a break."
Payoff not guaranteed
The situation can get worse if the student-athlete fails to get a college scholarship or doesn't perform up to expectations.
Depression and burnout may soon follow.
"People think they're a lot better than they might be, and when they don't have success, they don't know why," Gardner said.
"Not everybody's going to get the scholarship, and not everybody's going to win. There's always going to be a winner and loser."
But not every single-sport athlete is headed for an unhappy ending.
For a few, there is a college scholarship. The Milwaukee Sting estimates that at least 50 athletes have gone on to Division I schools, 13 to Division II schools and 10 to Division III schools since 1993.
There are social benefits, like teens gaining lifelong friends and sharing common experiences.
Keeping children busy, regardless of whether it is in a single sport or five sports, combats the obesity epidemic in American youth
"The number of athletes that we have participating in programs does continue to grow," Chickering said.
"We have to ask ourselves are we better off to have 10 kids participating in one sport each than we are to have three kids participating in three sports and one on one. The number of sports seasons would come out to 10 (in both cases)."
Yet the WIAA itself is being squeezed by the specialization trend.
The organization specifies dates for "in-season" and "out-of-season" coaching contact to discourage the monopolization of one sport, only to see its member schools and coaches request more off-season contact with student-athletes.
"We live in a choice environment," Chickering said. "It's very popular with our legislatures and our courts."
Very few sporting events can rival the energy of a high school contest. But as amateur sports takes on a professional attitude, education becomes an afterthought.
"Sports provide the opportunity to learn about life," Gardner said.
"When you start to put the pressure to win, the pressure to have to be the best, the pressure to get the scholarship, it really takes the shift and focus off of the life development."
From the July 10, 2005, editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Have an opinion on this story? Write a letter to the editor or start an online forum.
Subscribe today and receive 4 weeks free! Sign up now.
SPECIALIZATION IN HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS
This is the first of a three-part series on the growing trend of high school athletes opting to specialize in a single sport on a year-round basis. Other parts:
• MONDAY: Just how busy can a single-sport athlete be? We visit with Milwaukee Pius basketball player D'Angalo Jackson and former Brookfield Central s****r player Marti Desjarlais, who play in tournaments around the nation to boost their profile for college recruiters.
• TUESDAY: Some students still value the experience of playing different high school sports, including national high school tennis player of the year Katie Potts of Divine Savior Holy Angels, who also played basketball and s****r. Do these athletes feel like "throwbacks?"
Original Post