Playing Recreational Sports Helps Develop Lifelong Athletes Focusing on a Single Sport Leads to Risk of Injuries, Burnout
Focusing on a single sport at too young an age leads to a risk of injury and burnout that can cause an athlete to quit sports altogether. P laying multiple recreational sports leads youths to develop physically, develop a love of sports and to become lifelong athletes.
“Those people don’t become lifelong athletes,” she says. “One thing I love,” says Garrison, “in the NFL Draft they always take the top 10 picks and show all the sports they played through high school. All of them played multiple sports. Very few specialized in football early on. In the NFL, you have to be a very good athlete.” The sports medicine field has also identified psychological burnout. Garrison explains that, at an early age, kids pick up on the pressure and stop having fun in sports. She cites cases in which athletes are highly recruited by colleges, but quit playing because they are simply burned out. A decline is even being seen in the number of youths playing high school sports. Garrison and her husband see the pressure even living in a rural community where some youths take private sports lessons. “Our goal for our kids is, if they’re comfortable playing every intramural sport offered in college, they will play. If they become a scholarship athlete, good. [But] we want them to become lifelong athletes.” As early as third or fourth grade, Garrison observes, youths begin playing on travel teams and stop playing in recreational leagues which can make it harder to form recreational leagues. Tolin says that SCPR sports leagues see a drop-off as youths enter middle school and play on either school teams or switch to traveling teams.
-- Karen Garrison, MA, LAT, ATC
Shawnee County Parks + Recreation offers youth sports leagues for ages four to 14 with some leagues ranging to age 18. Sports include soccer, flag football, basketball, t- ball, baseball, softball, volleyball and additional offerings such as kickball and street hockey. League seasons are kept short, allowing young athletes to try multiple sports without overlapping seasons. “I want a child to try every sport they can so they can find the sport they really love,” says Karen Garrison, MA, LAT, ATC. Garrison is a senior lecturer in kinesiology at Washburn University and an athletic trainer for Cotton O’Neil Orthopedics and Sports Medicine. Youths specializing in a single sport at too young an age is a hot topic among athletic trainers and orthopedic surgeons who are seeing athletes enter college with overuse injuries and an increase in the number of Tommy John surgeries for ulnar collateral ligament injuries among baseball players even as young as 10 to 12 years of age. These were not problems 20 years ago, according to Garrison.
Playing different sports helps youths develop upper body strength, lower body strength and balance.
“The more sports youths play, the more challenges they learn to handle from the speed of the game, to different types of hand-eye coordination, motor skills and even playing in different weather,” says Darren Tolin, Shawnee County Parks + Recreation Sports Supervisor. Having overall athletic ability is what leads to success as a college or professional athlete, says Garrison. She explains that if you take an athlete who has only focused on baseball for years and put them in a basketball game, they struggle.
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