Sports specialization is defined as intense, year-round training focused solely on development within and for a single sport, to the exclusion of all other sports.

It’s a current topic that’s seeing heated debate over the pros and cons of this approach.

As a youth soccer coach who has been involved coaching for over 35 years, who was a in high school himself was a dedicated football, track and basketball player, and whose children explored a wide variety of sports before settling on track and field, softball, basketball and soccer, I’m completely against the idea of sports specialization.

I wanted to share my perspective, because I believe resolving this topic once and for all is essential to chartering richer athletic programs and developing healthier lives for our children.

Understanding the Growing & Maturing Skeleton

Just to get it out of the way: research supports the argument that it’s just not healthy to focus development on a single sport during the years a child’s physical and athletic development accelerates. Why? Because different sports require the development of different muscle groups. Overdeveloping certain muscles at the cost of under-developing others will almost inevitably lead to physical injury.

Plus, there’s also the possible mental and emotional fatigue and burn-out that can come with such a singular focus. This leads to a loss of any sense of fun or enjoyment from sports participation.

For a great article that offers a wealth of useful statistics, see WebMD’s March/April 2018 edition of their digital magazine. The article itself begins on page 30.

Click to access WebMD_MarchApril18_FullIssueSite.pdf

Once puberty begins, both boys and girls go through their Adolescent Growth Spurt (AGS). Needless to say, these changes, and the ages at which they occur, can have a significant impact on a child’s sports performance.
Rapid growth of a young athlete – on average males begin at age 12 and accelerates through of ages 14, 15, and 16, slowing down by age 20. Girls growth rates are typically two years ahead, beginning at age 10 and slowing by age 18. Parents and coaches need to understand this, and embrace the fact that adolescent bodies are not prepared or ready to be treated like an adult’s body.

This is essential to understanding they risks inherent in the idea of sports specialization.

Injuries are most often seen at growth plates, and in growing bones, ligaments and joints. Constant changes during an athlete’s teen years in bodyweight, height, and muscle mass, provide additional stress to joints and connective tissue. In young athletes, growth cartilage is present at the growth plate as well as the musculotendinous insertion. This growth cartilage is especially vulnerable to the stress of repeated micro traumas that can be incurred from repeat motions or activities that occur when playing a particular sport (e.g. tennis or pitcher’s elbow).

Proactive efforts to prevent these sorts of injuries can be made simply by encouraging young athletes to participate in different sports across the different seasons. Changing sports every season gives the body time to adapt to the changes of loads being placed upon it by a particular sport, while creating opportunities for the athlete to focus on and develop different muscle groups in a more holistic fashion which strengthens their entire body, and not just a particular subset of muscles.

Dr. Joel Brenner, the Chairman of the American Academy of the Council on Sports Medicine and Fitness offers, “The recommendation we’ve put out there is no more than five days a week of training and at least one to two months off during the year, minimum, for a particular sport,”

The Answer: Diversification
Simply, ‘diversification’ is the concept of intentionally focusing on the development of different muscle groups through training and participation in a variety of sports.
Diversification provides the young athlete with valuable physical, cognitive, and psychosocial environments, which helps to promote motivation to pursue athletics, along with a well-rounded year-round physical development regimen.

Diversification also offers greater potential to minimize activity and sports abandonment, while maximizing sustained participation, fostering positive peer relationships and leadership skills.

The US Olympic program publicized a 5 step program:
1) Discover, Learn, and Play (ages 0–12 years)
2) Develop and Challenge (ages 10–16 years)
3)Train and Compete (ages 13–19 years)
4) Excel for High Performance or Participate and Succeed (ages ≥15 years)
5) Mentor and Thrive (for Life).

Top youth sports researchers Jean Cote and Jessica Fraser-Thomas offer the following age breakdown for athletes trying to achieve elite status in a specific sport
• Prior to age 12: 80% of time should be spent in deliberate play and in sports OTHER                                    THAN the chosen sport!
• Age 13-15: A 50/50 split between a chosen sport and other athletic pursuits
• Age 16+: Even when specialization becomes very important, 20% of training time should still be in the non-specialized sport and deliberate play.

Still one must be aware of the signs of overtraining and too much intensity some of the signs are: under or impaired performance; fatigue or exhaustion; mood disturbances; apathy; disturbed sleep loss of appetite; and irritability.
Early diversification develops a broad range of fundamental motor skills and different sport experiences that provide the athlete with more performance options and athleticism if they choose to specialize in one sport later.

I personally like to stress the ABC’S: Agility, Balance, Coordination, and Speed are the basic skills required for physical literacy which result from multisport participation.

• The NFHS equally divided 1,500 male and female athletes among 29 Wisconsin high schools for the study and found lower-extremity injuries happen nearly twice as much (46 percent) to single-sport participants compared to multi-sport athletes (24 percent).
• A 2013 American Medical Society for Sports Medicine survey found that 88% of college athletes surveyed participated in more than one sport as a child.

Above and Beyond Injuries and Motivation
Multi-sport participation at the youngest ages yields better decision making and pattern recognition, as well as increased creativity. These are all qualities that coaches of high level teams and coaches look for.

US Youth Soccer surveyed more than 500 college soccer coaches and asked if they prefer an athlete who played multiple sports. Of the 221 Division 1 coaches who answered, just 7% said they prefer a player who played only soccer.

One more study from the Aspen Institute Project Play revealed that 7 out of 10 Olympic athletes surveyed by the United States Olympic Committee said they grew up as multisport athletes and defined athletic diversification as valuable.
In Conclusion

Our American educational system stresses the role of an athlete must play as part of the educational mission of our schools. It stresses the role of a coach as a teacher first—and for the student athlete – as a student first and athlete second.

The key to making this all work is to encourage coaches at all levels of youth sports, across all sports, to work together. To collaborate and cooperate in the development of helping their shared athletes craft personalized, year-round athletics programs that lets them take full advantage of diversification.

Additional Resources

For more information on preventing injuries in soccer, and for exercises, visit: http://www.yrsa.ca/pdf/Fifa11/11plus_workbook_e.pdf

Additional technical research papers can be found here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3658407/

and

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2016/08/25/peds.2016-2148

Coach Ed Weil. United Soccer Coach

One last thought;  How Our American High Schools support of Diversification

Our High Schools do so by offering three seasons of sports: Fall, Winter and Spring, each season with multiple sports to play and enjoy. Providing the opportunity to develop all the different muscles essential for a healthy life… developing the complete person: mind, body and spirit.
Multisport athletes also have a much higher chance of being active adults later in life. They are exposed to different roles, wider range of classmates and mentors. Each sport may challenge athletes in different ways and the skills developed such as agility, balance and coordination may help them in other sports as well. This enables them to be flexible, multi-dimensional, by being exposed to many situations makes them even more coachable and team player in life. Multiple sports participation helps them obtain broader life skills with healthier outcomes.
Developing Better Overall Skills and Ability: Research shows that early participation in multiple sports leads to better overall motor and athletic development, longer playing careers, increased ability to transfer sports skills to other sports and increased motivation, ownership of the sports experiences and confidence.