I’ve written at length about the benefit of young athletes playing multiple sports to develop all around athleticism, avoid overuse, and become a better total athlete later in their careers when it matters most.

Many times parents and coaches chase short term sport specific skill development to the detriment of overall long term athleticism.

Here is a whole video on why athleticism gets “paid” and not sport specific skill: https://youtu.be/_UrnAfx10iE

Anyway, this email is going to about another reason why young athletes should play multiple sports…

I was speaking with a guy at the gym last night and he was telling me about how his nephews are really into hockey. One is a 16 year old and one is a 14 year old freshman. Basically, the family has spent all the past 10 years traveling around the country, spending every dime they make, and every minute of the day involved in travel hockey. Currently the boys are in high school and the older one is a bigger, stronger, guy and is having more success. The younger one has now broken both arms and a leg since they started full contact hockey. They younger one is much smaller and more frail. With all the hockey, they have failed to add any strength training to their schedule and now the younger one especially is struggling.

This type of scenario plays out too often in youth sports. This is basically a case where most likely the younger athlete is not in the right sport. Basically, they have set him up for failure by not exposing him to multiple sports when he was young and thus he is now basically stuck in a sport where he’s going to get dominated by more natural hockey athletes (bigger, stronger, tougher, etc).

In a perfect world, the parent picks the sport that he/she played and the child excells at an early age, grows into the body needed to be good in the sport, and has the natural physiology needed to be good at the given sport such as endurance or speed, strength, coordination, etc….

Problem is that it rarely happens. For an athlete to find their best sport they probably need to be exposed to a bunch of sports first. To not give those opportunities is doing them a disservice, in my opinion. They have plenty of time to specialize when you see how they’re going to develop. In the case above, that kid is probably more suitable to an endurance sport or at least a non-contact sport.

Hope this all makes sense…