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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I always liked this article:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/opinion/sports-should-be-childs-play.amp.html

Fwiw I ran track in college but didn’t start it until HS. I beat out a lot of others who ran younger and burned out by HS. I ran around in other sports until then. (Soccer / LAX)[/quote]

It is a very interesting and provocative article. I wish it included some important additional information to better quantify the risks and benefits of early specialization. In terms of risk of injury, do you have the same risk if you specialize early at swimming, gymnastics, soccer, baseball, or football? is it the same for boys vs girls? It's hard to tell. One of the references includes the following conclusion:

&quot;Injured follow up subjects were more likely to be female (p&lt;0.02), report age of specialization &lt;12 (p=0.03) and participate in year round training&gt;8 mths/yr (p&lt;0.03), and a higher proportion were more highly specialized.&quot;

I cannot access the whole article because it is behind a paywall. But the conclusions don't differentiate by sport. The authors also don't seem to control for the confounding possibility that children who specialize early might also be more likely to play hard (at whatever they play) than children who don't specialize early, and might therefore be more likely to get injured per hour of play. In other words, maybe children who specialize early are different than those who do not.

Also, say that you are not as much interested in minimizing the risk of injury, but instead you want to maximize the risk of your child getting a scholarship or becoming a professional athlete. This is probably not a prudent approach for most people.. but let's say you have a very talented and motivated child. Should they specialize early? does it depend on their gender? their sport? it's also hard to tell. In your case, you were able to specialize to track in college. However you probably couldn't have specialized late into being a baseball pitcher, or a soccer player.

As it is probably clear from this post, I had a very open lunch time break that allowed me to wonder about these issues that are probably not interesting to anyone else... I hope all your kids remain injury free and enjoy your summer. 
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