Overbaked

“I tell parents this:  If the best pitchers in the world don’t pitch year-round, why should your kid?”

     –     Tommy John, former MLB pitcher, in an interview with Dan Patrick in Sports Illustrated (May 26, 2014)

Repetitive motion injuries are up exponentially in youth athletes over the past decade.

Knees for girls soccer players.  Concussions for virtually every sport.  Elbows and shoulders for young baseball pitchers.

The cause is clear, in an era of “specialization,” where so many people think their little Jimmy or Sally is going to earn a free education on the pitch, diamond, court or gridiron.  If your 9-year-old is spending three hours a day on the range, she might become a scholarship golfer.  She might even become a pro.  But she’ll miss being 9-years-old.  If your gifted child sacrifices every other season to extend one sport year-round, you might want to remember that fellow who wore #23 for the Chicago Bulls was cut from his high school basketball team as an underclassmen.

Late bloomers?  Balanced athletes?  The way things are going, we’ll never know about the former because we won’t have any of the latter.

If the plan is for Jimmy or Sally to support your retirement with an NBA or LPGA paycheck, that’s not.  A.  Plan.

So, here’s an idea.  Wanna make a difference for your kid?

Let ’em be a kid.  Let ’em try multiple sports.  Align them with coaches that understand that you can learn the game, get much better and still have the time of your life doing it.

It’s not just in the Bible that there’s a time and a season for everything.