Multiple Sport Athletes
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Anonymous
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I don't think most doctors have any kind of background that would help them in determining whether single-sport specialization vs multi-sport participation is more likely to enhance soccer talent.
--------------------------------------- Are you kidding? Orthopedists specializing in youth sports injuries is a whole cottage industry. Particularly in this area --- they'll be able to tell quite a bit. And based on my experience and interaction with them, the number one problem is repetitive stress and over training injuries from doing the same over and over. |
Anonymous
71% of DI men’s football players were multisport athletes in high school. |
Anonymous
Football isn’t a International sport and skills are developed upon athletes well after puberty. This constant comparison of soccer to American football is why folks just don’t get it |
Anonymous
I'm the PP you are quoting. You seem to have left out the part of my post where I specifically noted that orthopedists are in a position to weigh in on which training regimens are likely to reduce or increase potential for injury. But avoiding injury is just one part of the equation. Orthopedists don't typically have any expertise in figuring out which types of youth training are most likely to help develop successful pro players. |
Anonymous
I keep forgetting soccer is special --- with rules that apply strictly soccer because its different than any other sport. 7 out of 10 US Olympic athletes surveyed grew up playing multiple sports and found the experience valuable. About 88% of D1 lacrosse players, played another sport in high school. US Youth Soccer surveyed more than 500 college soccer coaches and asked if they prefer an athlete who played multiple sports. Of the 221 Division I coaches who answered, just 16 — 7 percent — said they would prefer a player who played only soccer and was not a multi-sport athlete. |
Anonymous
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This constant comparison of soccer to American football is why folks just don’t get it
------------------------- More likely, men's soccer is a blip on the American sports radar. People just don't care. |
Anonymous
Good to know if your goal is to impress college coaches, which is the best most of our kids can hope for. I have to say though that it's kind of annoying that so many of these college coaches answer the survey one way, and then go out of their way to recruit (and give scholarships to) all these foreign players who only ever played soccer growing up. Has anyone done a survey on what the coaches for the top professional teams in the world think about this question? Seems like that would be helpful information. |
Anonymous
Approximately 0% of us will have children who play a sport on a top professional team. Slightly more will have children who play in college. But most of us will have children who play rec or club, and then goes on to live a perfectly normal life without high level athletics. For my kids, multi-sports works well in supporting that. Swim is a life long sport, which has been beneficial to them. But neither of my kids were solely focused on swim, so I'm also thankful for soccer and lacrosse. And my lacrosse kid also loved basketball. My kids will have experience across multiple sports enabling them to play casual pick up games, in adult beer leagues, and so on for the rest of their lives. Being multi sport athletes allowed them to learn different things from their various sports, and it meant they weren't tied into whichever one they started first. Soccer kid tried field hockey in high school. She probably wouldn't have given it a go if her life had been all soccer-soccer-soccer to the exclusion of everything else. I suppose for the 0% of us who are raising kids who are going to be at the very top of their sport, missing a swim meet for a soccer game would be unacceptable, and a sign of a problem. For the rest of us, it's exposing our kids to a variety of activities and hoping they find things, or at least habits, that will stick with them through adulthood helping them to have a long and healthy life. |
Anonymous
I agree but how is this relevant? Post is about playing them all at the same time and causing fatigue and injury. So your kid wakes up for swim, goes to lacrosse and then soccer? |
Anonymous
You're a cherry picker. That's your biggest flaw and the reason your argument fails time and time again. So your argument now is that college coaches are going overseas to find international players to fill the role of student athletes because they specialized in one sport and are therefore better? Let me help you out. The kids with international level talent will typically specialize. However, they make up less than 1 percent. That's your focus? Fine! We are talking about the 99 percent. |
Anonymous
All of the articles I’ve seen encouraging multiple sport participation have been written by orthopedists. |
Anonymous
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Doctors are doctors. They do not like collisions and people getting hurt. No one does, but in theory -- when assessing the pros and cons of a given sport -- it should be considered.
There is a group that has kept injury stats for college sports starting in the 1980s as submitted by team trainers and doctors. They are an interesting read, because they have good participation and good numbers. The stats have gotten better of the years as injury types and areas have gotten more precise. Soccer is always problemactic because of knee and head injuries. More knees for women than guys. More heads for guys than women. Pretty consistent with how the game is played really. Still -- the scary stat for parents like me of a daughter who played college soccer is that essentially there is one knee injury (ligament damage/tear) necessitating more than 2 weeks out of practice/games per team, per year. Basically the stats are based on an "event" which is a practice or a game. So, with a team of 25 women soccer players the stats would say you are going to get at least 1 and likely 2 blown knees in a given year. (Obviously a tear will be 6 months to a year - but they do not track beyond 2 weeks which would be a sprain.) Sadly -- having had a daughter play club from u9 through u18, 4 years of high school varsity and 4 years in college -- I would say that those stats were pretty darn accurate. Her club teams were about 1 acl/mcl tear per year from u14 to u18. There was one bad concussion which kept a kid out for about 6 months. Her college team only had two acls in 4 years -- pretty good, and two major concussion incidents -- 1 head to head, and 1 head to goalpost that were season ending - apparently about average on those. Her friends' teams were often not as lucky - so, again, I would say those expected averages were pretty much on point. It does change things from the dad perspective -- in a college game you find yourself rooting for the following: (1) your kid to play if that is at all iffy, (2) you kid not get hurt, (3) again, your kid not get hurt (4) no one else getting hurt (4) your kid to do well; and (5) you hope your kid's team wiins. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
Ajax used to incorporate gymnastics and judo sessions in their training regiment in early 2000s, but they might have reduced or eliminated these elements in recent years, |
Anonymous
Fatigue was one aspect. Another issue the speaker brought up was being a generalist, and another was that if you polled the top players you'd also find single-sport players among them. Most of our kids are going to benefit from being generalists, and approximately none of our children will be top players. Considering fatigue, as the parent of kids who like their sports but are not sports prodigies, it's never been an issue. My lacrosse kid swims for an hour and a half before school 3-4 days a week. During basketball season, he has 1.5 - 2 hour basketball practice after school, and then 2-3 days a week, a 1-2 hour lacrosse practice. He loves it. He goes for runs regularly, not as part of a practice for any of his sports but because he likes being physically active. On a day when he has all of his sports, he's doing a maximum of 6 hours of exercise, and it is rare that he has an entire "run them until they drop" practice. Usually it's bursts of focused activity, interspersed with focus on perfecting elements of what he's working on. He's tired at the end of a day with all the practices, but not exhausted. And he'd stop participating in his sports if he weren't enjoying it. Another element multi-sport kids benefit from. I know a kid who played lacrosse intensely, and when she gave up lacrosse (injuries) she was lost for a couple of months figuring out who she was, who her friends were, etc. I'd also argue that's a rare kid, so I wouldn't use it as a "reason single sport focus is bad." It was a problem for this kid, based on how she had been focusing on one thing. Same thing would have happened if she'd been focusing on violin and had to unexpectedly give it up. She's a single-minded, dedicated, all-in kid. My lacrosse kid's an anomaly doing multiple sports in the same season. We know plenty of kids who have a fall sport, a winter sport, and a spring sport. Traditional multi-sport kids. Fatigue won't be an issue for them any more than a kid playing soccer year round. |