Balance. The Ultimate Goal. Ricky Lankford
Select soccer is a tool that serves a purpose. Once you understand that you need to recognize when to use it. What is the appropriate age for your child to begin this new level? There is an ongoing debate in youth soccer about when, and for whom, the emphasis should move from recreational play to more serious, competitive, dedicated, focused, specialized sports activities. The following article makes some very valid points.
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Unhealthy Competition
Young kids are training like professionals, and have the injuries to prove it
Regan McMahon, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, April 15, 2007
Excerpted from REVOLUTION IN THE BLEACHERS by Regan McMahon. Published by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright (c) 2007 by Regan McMahon.
In March 2005, The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine published my article exploring how the over-the-top youth sports culture was affecting kids and families. Titled "How Much Is Too Much?" it generated tremendous reader response, and two months later I signed a deal with Gotham Books to investigate the issue on a national scale. The results of that research, conducted in the academic year 2005-2006, appear in my book, "Revolution in the Bleachers: How Parents Can Take Back Family Life in a World Gone Crazy Over Youth Sports."
In the book, I look at the way youth sports have changed in the past 20 years and how those changes have altered the nature of childhood in America and patterns of family life. Many households are putting demanding sports schedules above bonding rituals such as eating dinner together, taking family vacations, spending holidays with relatives and relaxing at home on weekends. Lots of kids are stressed out, and some are getting burned out. I wondered if, for this generation, success at sports was coming at too high a cost. And I came up with suggestions of how parents can bring balance back into their children’s lives.
One of the costs of the hypercompetitive sports life is physical injury, the subject of the following excerpt. Previously, kids played multiple sports seasonally and usually didn’t specialize in one sport or get serious about team sports until middle school or high school. Now kids often play one sport all year long, which has caused a dramatic rise in overuse injuries...
Dr. Ronald Kamm, director of Sport Psychiatry Associates, in Oakhurst, N.J., told me, "We enacted child labor laws 80 years ago to protect children from all this work. And now basically we’re making play into work. And they’re working as hard as they used to in the sweat shops, some of them. I’m concerned about it, it’s out of hand and kids do need downtime and seasons off and multiple sports. There is the occasional prodigy who just loves the sport and is focused on it, maybe a Tara Lipinski or a Tiger Woods. But most kids do better with many sports. It protects them and they don’t get overuse injuries as much and it keeps them from burning out..."
"When it comes to preventing the overuse injuries, the simple thing to do is, instead of playing one sport year-round, they should be playing two or three sports," Dr. Robbie DaSilva, of Midlands Orthopaedics, in Columbia, S.C., told Joey Holleman of The State newspaper. "Then they don’t strain the same joint year-round."
"Children are especially susceptible because their bones are still growing," Holleman wrote in an August 2005 article titled "Take Me Ouch to the Ballgame." "The growth plates at the ends of the bones are spongy, rather than the hard bones of adults. In general, bones stop growing in females around age 13 and males around 15. Until those ages, young athletes’ bones need a break from repetition."
"The No. 1 risk factor is year-round playing of a sport," Dr. James Andrews, a nationally prominent orthopedic surgeon based in Birmingham, Ala., told the Cincinnati Enquirer. "It starts with minor injuries, and by the time they are in high school, it turns up as a serious injury." He estimates he’s treating four times as many overuse injuries as he did in 2000, including chipped bones, torn elbow ligaments, cracked kneecaps and lower back damage.
"We used to see these injuries in the 15- to 18-year-old range," Dr. Anthony Stans, pediatric orthopedic surgeon at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn., told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "Now we’re seeing it in kids as young as 8 or 9..."
Katie Graeve played soccer from age 5 and became captain of the women’s varsity soccer team at Eagan High School, in St. Paul, Minn., but spent half of her high school soccer career on the sidelines with her leg in a brace. The center midfielder tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee before the beginning of the season in her junior year, and tore the ACL in her left knee two games into her senior season. She has endured two surgeries and eight months of painful physical therapy.
"I played basketball back in the day," she told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. "I wonder if I would have kept another sport, and not played soccer all year-round, if that would have helped..."
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"When you look at the physical stress that’s being placed on the body, the bottom line is kids are doing too much," assistant athletic director and athletic trainer at Bishop O’Dowd Carlos Arriaga told me. "Kids’ bodies are not developing at a faster rate than they were many years ago. There are developmental stages that the kids have to go through. I work with a lot of kids dealing with injuries and also doing strength and conditioning training, and I’ll often hear coaches say, ’So-and-so has got to get stronger; they’ve got to bulk up.’ That may be true, but, as I tell the coaches, their bodies are going to develop when they develop, when they mature. And that might not happen until they’re 18, 19 or 20. So to think that if you take a kid and have him lift weights every day that all of a sudden he’s going to be this bulky, strong individual, that’s not reality. Everyone’s going to do it at a different level..."
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The costs of specialization
Even though sports medicine specialists, college coaches and orthopedic surgeons keep hammering the point that playing multiple sports is better than specialization for young athletes, some parents and coaches at the youth level continue to insist that the three-sport high school athlete is going the way of the typewriter, and that to compete in today’s world, focus on one sport is a must. And a surprising number of parents think that means specializing at the youngest levels.
They should talk to Monica Mertle, who didn’t do any sports until fifth grade and still ended up getting a college scholarship to a Division I school, St. Mary’s in Moraga. She told me that as a young girl, "I did all stereotypically girlie things: acting, dance, ballet, singing. I didn’t even like sports before fifth grade." At that point she joined for social reasons when everyone was going out for the basketball team at her K-8 Catholic school in Santa Rosa, "and I ended up falling in love with it." She also joined the volleyball team and played on both until high school, when she specialized in basketball. After playing "in some low-key YMCA leagues" in sixth grade, she moved on to AAU basketball in seventh. "And that’s when it got really serious. That’s when it became all year."
Monica questions the reasoning of pushing kids to specialize at a young age in order to get a scholarship down the line. "The parents have such an important role in this," she says. "I mean, when you’re 5, you’re going to do what your parents say. At that age, their kid should be playing on the swings and maybe have a good time with their sport, and practice on the weekends or whatever. Grade school is a good time to do what you want and try out different sports. By the time high school came around, I was completely comfortable making the decision that I just wanted to play basketball.
"If you get too serious when a child is 5, 6, 7 years old, it’s easy to understand how it becomes a chore. Because kids that age want to go to the playground and run around and play in the dirt. They don’t want to do all these drills. A parent really has to be in tune with whether their child is having fun. Because the minute it stops being fun, they don’t want to do it anymore."
Parenting author and Oakland’s Redwood Day School head Mike Riera sees the benefit of exploring multiple sports in terms of children’s personal growth. "Why the pressure for a kid to know what their sport is when they’re 10 years old? If we’re really trying to develop kids who are multifaceted, and kids who have multiple intelligences, then they need to play a variety of sports. They need to play the one where they’re the natural, and they need to play one where they’re not so good. And they have to know what it’s like to be picked last. So the kid who’s great in soccer may be a lousy basketball player because they don’t have that kind of coordination. They need to know what that’s like, instead of being protected, going for the soccer all the time..."
The saddest fact is that most overuse injuries are preventable. Dr. John P. DiFiori, associate professor and chief of the Division of Sports Medicine at UCLA’s Department of Family Medicine, who has studied overuse injuries in young athletes for several years, told the Salt Lake Tribune that young athletes have a better chance of avoiding overuse injuries if they avoid heavy training loads and early sport-specific training and take adequate rest periods.
"An emphasis on one sport under the age of 10 should be avoided," said DiFiori. "Parents are so focused on winning even when their children are 8, 9 and 10 years old because they think it will give them an extra edge to get a college scholarship."
The hardest pill to swallow, for kids and some parents, is the need for rest -- rest between seasons, rest during the week and rest after an injury.
Kremchek, the Cincinnati Reds’ orthopedic surgeon, told the Cincinnati Enquirer, "Just today, I had a 9-year-old girl in my office and she could barely walk. Her foot and ankle hurt her so badly. She plays soccer on three teams, and I said, ’We’ll put you in a boot for three weeks.’ The first thing the father says is: ’We’ve got the championships in a week. Can she play in a week?’
"I said, ’You’ve got to be kidding me.’ I think once the dad realized what he had said, he took a step back. But that’s the mentality you’re dealing with."
DaSilva, of Columbia, S.C., knows what to say to parents who think taking six months off to rehabilitate after a serious injury will kill their child’s potential college scholarship or professional sports career. First, he reminds them that very few young athletes ever reach those levels. Then, "I tell them if that child was meant to be the next [pro pitching great] Greg Maddux, he’s still going to be the next Greg Maddux even if he takes the fall season off..."
Dr. Jack Vander Schilden, an orthopedic surgeon in Little Rock, Ark., is horrified by the number of games young athletes on club teams play in a tournament weekend. "Six games, three on two days in a row!" he exclaimed to People. "The pros couldn’t tolerate that!.."
There is only one reason: Because winning has become that important. The time has come to get our priorities straight. No trophy, no scholarship is worth endangering our child’s health. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that these athletes are children, not facsimiles of professional players. We can’t abdicate our role as protector because we’ve been seduced by the siren call of the scholarship. And remember, they didn’t start out with a win-at-all-costs mentality -- the kids getting Tommy John surgeries, the kids taking steroids. They’re kids. They got involved in sports because they love to play.
Rise Up and Revolt: What You Can Do Now
Encourage multiple sports.
Listen to the orthopedic surgeons. Playing different sports can prevent repetitive stress injuries. Support your child in playing multiple sports -- seasonally, not year-round -- as long as she can, even in high school. College coaches say multi-sport athletes are often their best players. It’s good to learn and grow in different sports, and it’s better for your body to not use the same muscle groups all the time.
Resist the push to specialize at an early age
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The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that kids wait till puberty to specialize in one sport. There is no evidence that specializing early increases the likelihood of being an exceptional athlete in a sport. The best, tallest basketball player in fourth grade can be completely overtaken in eighth or ninth when he stops growing and his classmates go through puberty, catch up to him, then grow taller and display an increased athleticism. If you decide when your kid is 5 that he must specialize in soccer to get a scholarship when he’s 18, you may be preventing him from finding out when he’s 11 that he’s a great pitcher or has a passion for hoops.
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