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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]We should urge kids to avoid hyperspecialization and instead sample a variety of sports through at least age 12.

Nearly a third of youth athletes in a three-year longitudinal study led by Neeru Jayanthi, director of primary care sports medicine at Loyola University in Chicago, were highly specialized — they had quit multiple sports in order to focus on one for more than eight months a year — and another third weren’t far behind. Even controlling for age and the total number of weekly hours in sports, kids in the study who were highly specialized had a 36 percent increased risk of suffering a serious overuse injury. Dr. Jayanthi saw kids with stress fractures in their backs, arms or legs; damage to elbow ligaments; and cracks in the cartilage in their joints.....
....In the Loyola study, sport diversification had a protective effect. But in case health risks alone aren’t reason enough for parents to ignore the siren call of specialization, diversification also provides performance benefits.

Kids who play multiple “attacking” sports, like basketball or field hockey, transfer learned motor and anticipatory skills — the unconscious ability to read bodies and game situations — to other sports. They take less time to master the sport they ultimately choose.

Several studies on skill acquisition now show that elite athletes generally practiced their sport less through their early teenage years and specialized only in the mid-to-late teenage years, while so-called sub-elites — those who never quite cracked the highest ranks — homed in on a single sport much sooner.

Data presented at the April meeting of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine showed that varsity athletes at U.C.L.A. — many with full scholarships — specialized on average at age 15.4, whereas U.C.L.A. undergrads who played sports in high school, but did not make the intercollegiate level, specialized at 14.2.[/quote]
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/opinion/sports-should-be-childs-play.html?emc=eta1&_r=1[/quote]

I generally agree with the thesis of the article, but I question the causation implied by the UCLA study results.

The article implies that early specialization is a negative and offers as proof the fact that kids who top out in HS sports specialized in one sport earlier than kids who go on to play college level sports.  But surely the varsity college athletes in the study (many with full athletic scholarships) were ON AVERAGE bigger, stronger, and faster than the kids who topped out in HS level sports.   For that reason alone, the kids who ultimately play in college don't NEED to specialize in one sport early/earlier -- they have the physical attributes needed to play at the next level, so they don't feel the same pressure to focus on a single sport early/earlier.

It is also logical to assume that the more athletic the student, the more success he/she will have in a second or third sport, and therefore may want tol play the second or third sport longer into the HS years, than a less athletic student who plays a second or third sport.[/quote]

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