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In my personal opinion, sports are one of the best ways to help in the development of young people. Notice I didn’t say athletes, but people. There is a bigger purpose to sports than just wins and losses. In his recent Complete Youth Training product with Athlete’s Acceleration, strength and conditioning coach Mike Boyle gives what he believes are the purpose of sport
- Teach life lessons in a forgiving environment
- Learn that hard work pays off
- Become a better member of society
- Learn to arrive early, stay late, and provide more than what’s asked of you
He later goes on to say that these lessons are what helped him become a successful coach and I would agree that these same lessons learned in my athletic career have helped me not only in my professional life but my personal life.
The problem is…some parents are screwing up their kids with sports. Here are 5 common trends I have seen in my time working with high school kids.
Taking the fun out of it
I don’t know what it is about the athletic training room but kids will often open up to us on just about everything.
And the athlete may not come out and blatantly say it, but some of them by the time they reach high school despise the sport they once loved. I have even seen some finally step up to their parents and tell them they are done playing their sport. And one common trend within some of these kids is that the fun has been taken out of the sport. They have been pushed to only worry about wins and losses for so long that it begins to wear on them.
So many adults try to “professionalize” youth sports by making it about wins and losses and not focus on enjoying the sport.
Putting their kids on the “best” teams
Another way parents screw up with their young athletes is putting them on the best, or “stacked” teams. Parents are chasing W’s instead of the development of their child’s skills.
Failure, or losing, is a good thing and is necessary in the development of the athlete both physically and socially. Kids need to experience the joy of success and the disappointment of failure.
Losing isn’t the end of the world unless the athlete doesn’t learn from these failure. Constant and consistent success will lead to long term failure down the road.
So what is a parent to do? I think Thomas P. Johnson says it best, “Prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child.” Stop looking to put your athlete on the best teams, you may be setting your child up for failure down the road.
Side note: the word elite has become very watered down these days in AAU or travel team organizations. Just about every team calls themselves at elite.
Specializing too early
Early specialization may be the biggest problem in youth athletics. Parents will use outliers like the Williams sisters or Tiger Woods to back their decision to have their child specialize so early.
Early specialization is being sold to parents by people who have are typically selfish and financially motivated. They don’t have the best interest of your child in mind and it doesn’t work as well as many think.
If you take a look at Olympians, many considered to be the best athletes in the world, most were involved in an average of three sports per year until the age of 14. One German study compared medalists vs non-medalists in the Olympics, and found that medalists specialized 18 months later than their non-medalist competitors.
No one is going to care when your child is 30 years old that they played on the “elite” team all year round when they were 11 or 12 years old.
Early Specialization also leads to higher injury rates. We are seeing “adult” injuries in youth athletes. From low back pain to Tommy John Surgeries in 12 year olds. This isn’t supposed to be happening. Both of these injuries are overuse injuries, or too much mileage. If your child is having injuries that are not caused by trauma…that should be setting off sirens in your head.
Ineffective game to practice/training ratio
It is not uncommon to hear about an athlete playing in 3 or 4 games on the weekends but only having 1 practice session during the week (for comparison sake, let’s say that practice is 2 hours long).
Let’s look at basketball for instance. In a game, an athlete may average having the ball in their possession for an average of 10 minutes a game(these numbers are made up by the way). But if you compare practice, they can have the ball in their hand working on skills for up to an hour to an hour and a half. So in one practice, the athlete touched the ball for 90 minutes but in one weekend with 4 games they only touch the ball for 40 minutes. Which seems like a greater use of the athletes time??
So many parents, kids, and even coaches have an unfounded belief that playing in more games will help you develop your skills. To compare, do you take only tests to learn a topic? No, you obtain the information and review for days before you take the test to hopefully perform well. Well replace the word test with games and practice with review and you have a better model for getting better.
Athletes should be spending more time in controlled practice situations that not only teach skills but then integrate them into game like activities to learn obtain the skills needed for when they need them most.
No real off-season
Last but not least, most kids have no real offseason. They have no time to be kids. They have no time to go to the beach because they were told they must play in this U12 showcase to be seen by college coaches.
Let kids be kids. Let them have time off to rest and recover, or to enjoy other activities to enrich their lives such as the arts.
To wrap it all up…
If some of this got your feathers ruffled…then maybe you needed to hear it. Maybe as a parent you should begin to take a deep look into what you are doing with your young athlete.
If you have young children who haven’t hit playing sports yet, hopefully you learned something and maybe you can avoid some of the mistakes I have seen in my time working with high school athletes.
Sports are meant to be fun and to help teach our youth athletes some of life’s most important lessons. Too often some parents put too much emphasis on sports and especially the receiving of college scholarships.