Multi-Sport Imperative
September 15, 2015
Each single-sport organization promoted its own sport, and coaches of those sports tended to pressure athletes to focus on a single sport early in life and eventually exclusively. Parents bought into the fantasy that this early single-mindedness was the key to a college athletic scholarship and even a professional sports career.
While we spoke of a high-minded philosophy, on the local level, as a practical matter, more and more coaches and athletes were pursuing an ever-narrower sports experience. Until now.
Starting very recently, the conversation has changed, or at least it’s been joined by new voices. We’ve learned that Big Ten football coaches favor recruits who play more than football in high school. We’ve learned that our fantastic Women’s World Cup Soccer champions were almost all multiple-sport athletes in secondary school. We’ve learned that the hottest young U.S. golfer on the Men’s PGA Tour was a multiple-sport enthusiast in his teens. We’ve seen a half-dozen high profile sports executives with school-aged children advocate for a more balanced experience for their kids. And now we see several dozen amateur and professional sports organizations have joined a campaign to oppose the negative trends in youth sports and to promote a more balanced, healthier sports experience for children and adolescents.
And there it is – a healthier experience. Suddenly, our philosophy that multiple-sport participation is better for youth than sport specialization has been made a health and safety issue, which we’ve known all along but have not emphasized enough.
Now, with attention to over-use injuries and burnout, sport specialization has become a health and safety crisis on the level of concussions, heat illness and sudden cardiac arrest. Multi-sport participation has become a health and safety imperative. A matter of good public policy.
We need to catch and ride this wave for all it’s worth. In the same way the environmental movement catches fire when presented as a human rights issue – that people everywhere have a basic right to clean air and water – we must present sport specialization as a threat to young persons’ health and safety – a risk as great as head trauma, heat illness and heart failure, requiring the kind of bold policies and programs we’ve implemented in recent years to address those equally serious problems.
Helmet Debate Escalates in Girls Lacrosse
July 2, 2015
Recently the Florida High School Activities Association escalated the girls lacrosse helmet debate to higher levels by mandating the equipment during competition involving its member schools. I’m guessing their hearts are in the right place; but without a recognized performance standard yet established for such protective head gear, there are important practical questions added to the philosophical debate over the efficacy of such a requirement at this time. Here’s what we posted on this topic nearly two years ago.
One of our newest sports – girls lacrosse – is today presenting one of the oldest conundrums in competitive athletics.
On one side of the complex issues are many moms and dads who cite the dangers their daughters confront from contact to the head and face by other players’ sticks or the ball. They want hard helmets with face masks required in girls lacrosse. Many coaches and administrators agree.
On the other side of the issues are the “purists,” including the official position of US Lacrosse, who are concerned that by increasing head and face protection the rule makers would invite the kind of hard and high contact that would fundamentally alter the nature of the game and lead to more serious injuries in girls lacrosse.
This is the classic dilemma that the leadership and playing rules bodies of sports organizations have faced many times over many years for many sports. Justifiably.
When football added helmets, then face masks and then mouth protectors to the list of required equipment, there was a significant reduction in broken noses and chipped teeth, but techniques of blocking and tackling changed. The protected head and face became much more of a target and weapon than it had been before, and the unprotectable neck and spine became more at risk.
Some would argue that ice hockey’s experience is similar to football’s history. The discussion in the soccer community regarding hard helmets for goalkeepers and soft helmets for all other players often revolves around similar questions. Will required protective equipment change the game? And will one of the changes be that the game becomes still rougher and even more injurious, trading “moderate” injuries for more catastrophic?
While the debate continues over additional head protection requirements for girls lacrosse, and other sports, both sides seem to agree that the burden of the rule makers to be out-front in the search for ways to improve the rules is matched by the in-the-trenches responsibility of coaches to teach the game and officials to administer the contests in accordance with existing rules which already place a premium on participant safety.