When I coached swimming in a commercial club I encouraged parents of younger athletes (7- to 12-year-olds) to enroll them in a number of sports rather than just one. Participating in various sport activities allows children to grow both physically and socially in ways that participating in only one sport might not. As time passed though I realized two things. First, once established, yearly routines are hard to break. So, while families may follow my multi-sport advice with their 9-year-old athlete there will come a time when they need to choose an activity in which to excel. This assumes, of course, that the child is actually talented in one of the sports and wants to excel. But the multi-sport routine, once established, is hard to change.
The second thing is that each sport has its own lifecycle for success. This depends not only on the sport’s skill set and training demands, but also on when the best time to address these issues occurs in the human growth cycle. A 15-year-old just starting out in gymnastics, for example, has already passed the window of opportunity to reach that sport’s elite level. Some sports have small windows of opportunity. This is not to say that missing this window makes the sport a poor choice. I’m merely saying that families should understand as much as they can about what they’re getting into.
Why do I mention the elite level when we know that most athletes will never reach it? For two reasons: First, coaches need to understand what the big picture is in their sport and what’s required to get there. They are, after all, the experts that athletes listen to and parents should be able to ask for learned and sensible advice. Second, not knowing what the elite level of the sport requires means that the coach can’t possibly know if they’re providing the correct, age-appropriate training and instruction to their own athletes. This second aspect is probably the more important of the two, and should be the underlying theme of all coaching education.
But there is nothing overtly good or bad about single- or multi-sport participation. I think all the hand wringing over this comes from what we perceive as tradition. For many people high school provides the focus of sports in their lives. Even non-athletes are aware of the “big game” on Friday night. It’s part of our culture. So, too, was the boy who played football in the fall, basketball all winter, and then baseball in the spring. Girls used to follow the same pattern with volleyball, basketball, and track.
While this may be our traditional view of sports participation, there just aren’t that many 3-sport athletes anymore. High school coaches, like their college counterparts, are designing year-round training programs for their teams. Multi-sport participation is not encouraged, and may even be actively discouraged. But it’s wrong to think that this is the only reason this shift is taking place. Athletes might think that they have a better chance at a college scholarship if they concentrate on one sport; colleges don’t recruit “triple threats” anymore. Athletes might like one sport more than another, participate in their favorites season, and then spend more time on academics when the sport is not being played. Or, and here’s the problem that we’re really talking about, athletes join commercial club sports – gymnastics, swimming, track, hockey – because they like them and believe that the coaching and year round emphasis offer a better chance for success in college.
The single sport athlete is not just a result of changes in the way students experience high school. Our society has simply become more specialized. Students go to college now to learn skills, to gain specific knowledge that can be immediately applied. Time is of the essence. The frenzy to become experts at something is becoming part of our culture. There is no time for nebulous “experience” anymore; the time we have to become who we will be is running out. In this atmosphere, single sport athletes are inevitable.
APA reference format
Price, W. (2010, February). The single sport athlete. The Sportkid Project. Retrieved from http://www.sportkidproject.com/articles/price009.html