Post date: Jul 27, 2015 3:35:45 AM
As a recent Aspen Institute research paper notes, just about every signal parents and youth athletes receive today from the prevailing youth sports culture supports the idea that high doses of one sport at an early age is the only pathway to athletic stardom.
Well, not every signal.
We at MomsTEAM, for one, have been fighting that culture, and trying for the past 14 years to debunk the many myths that have grown up around the supposed need for kids to specialize in a single sport before adolescence.
In my 2006 book, "Home Team Advantage: The Critical Role of Mothers in Youth Sports," I devoted eight pages to cataloguing the reasons why early specialization (e.g. a year-round training program in one sport and the elimination of other activities) was a bad idea, which later formed the basis for a series of articles for MomsTEAM adapted from the book.
I wrote then that "the trend towards early specialization (to be distinguished from starting early, which, for some sports, such as ice hockey, is important), and an increasingly professionalized approach to youth sports, appears to be driven more by folklore, myths and half-truths, a herd mentality, the ever-burgeoning youth sports industry, and by adults more intent on winning than acting in the best long-term interests of children, than actual, cold, hard evidence." Unfortunately, it appears that the trend towards early specialization, if anything, is accelerating. To separate fact from fiction, and, in the hopes that parents will make decisions about the sports their children play based on facts, not fiction, here are answers to three of the most frequently asked questions about early sport specialization:Question: What are the benefits and drawbacks of early specialization?
Answer: The research supports a few specific benefits and domains in which early specialization is advantageous:
But for the vast majority of athletes, the drawbacks of early specialization are numerous. The majority of research suggests that early specialization can have significant negative consequences for the development of an athlete over time.
Studies have shown that early specialization:
Unfortunately, as the Aspen Institute research brief notes, the popular understanding - on the Internet and among sports parents - of the 10,000 hour rule "often dismisses the role of numerous factors that interact to shape skill acquisition such as genetic ability, maturation, coaching, parental support, and even general skills like physical fitness, and rather [attributes] sports expertise to only one element - engagement in deliberate practice.
Question: What are the benefits and drawbacks of playing multiple sports (early sampling)? Answer: Research suggests that sampling and playing multiple sports at an early age, instead of specializing, has numerous benefits, including long-term talent development.
Specifically, an early sampling pathway has been associated with:
As the Aspen Institute research brief notes, "a fair amount of research has supported [the idea] that [skill] transfer may be the most compelling argument that could be made for athletes to engage in sport sampling, especially at a young age." It cites in support a 2002 study by conducted for the US Olympic Committee showing that a majority of Olympians from the 80's and 90's cited playing multiple sports as young athletes and teenagers, and that having access to multiple sports programs as kids was very beneficial to their development and training. Similarly, a 2013 study surveying college athletes reported that only 30% of those surveyed specialized in just one sport prior to the age of 12, while 88% played more than one sport as a child, consistent with a 2010 study of female Division 1 college athletes which found that 83% played more than one competitive sport as a youth.