Early Specialization: My take on youth sports

The two questions I get asked most often about younger athletes are how soon can they start lifting weights and at what age should they specialize in one sport.

The answer to the first question is that they should begin strength training about the same age that they begin reaching puberty but I generally recommend that you consult their pediatrician before making a final decision. 

The answer to the second one may be more complex.  There simply is not just one path to athletic success.   A common thread among most more accomplished athletes is that they played a lot of different sports at an early age.

Take tennis great Roger Federer.   He played football until he focused on tennis beginning at age 12.  Andre Aggasi, on the other hand was dedicated to tennis by age 6.  Both were hugely talented but you could argue that Federer has had the more storied professional career.

I've talked about the athletic progression of my own children before.  Like lots of kids, my kids took gymnastics first.  Daughter Whitney's first team sport was softball and then she added basketball a couple of years later.   Her sophomore year of high school, she played softball, basketball, and volleyball.   Despite a late start to volleyball, her physical skills seemed particularly well matched to that sport.   A stellar college career confirmed that.

I've said before that my son Nick first loved the balance beam (a girl's event).  Like lots of boys, his first team sport was baseball.  Next came soccer, where the intensity he would later be known for came out.  As soon as I would let him, it was on to football, although because of his size, he was in the 8th grade before he got to play with kids his own age.

I always figured him for a football player, especially because of a gene pool that included a football legacy, but he loved all those other things, especially basketball.  As it turned out, football was his ticket and a football career at Clemson University followed.

Really, you can break sports development down into two parts:  basic movement education and the development of fine motor skills.   You might call this latter stage skills acquisition.  It's where you learn to hit a moving ball, throw or shoot a ball with accuracy, develop eye-hand and eye-foot coordination. 

Yet, it's that basic movement education that gets ignored with early specialization.   Every young athlete needs to learn how to move first.   That means they need to be able to run, thrown, kick, change directions, basically how to control their body as it moves through space.

If you focus too much on skills before you get the basics down, you definitely have the cart before the horse.

And that's where early specialization might be a mistake.   Travel teams, position coaches, and playing a single sport year round are simply a mistake for the youngest of our athletes because it doesn't provide them with the opportunity to learn how to move.

This doesn't mean that if you think your child seems to have a talent for a particular sport at an early age that you shouldn't support that.   I have a cycling buddy whose 9 year old son really does seem to have a talent for the bicycle.  The fact that he will spend 2 hours on the back of a bike and enjoy it means that he will at least be an endurance athlete.

But make sure that they play other things as well so that they get the all-around athletic development that different sports provide.