By playing one sport, athletes face higher injury risk

Sam Spiegelman/Capital News Service

COLLEGE PARK, Md. — A growing number of young athletes are focusing on playing a single sport, putting themselves at greater risk of serious injuries, physicians said.

“When athletes that play one sport and one sport alone, there’s probably more hours of competition in that one sport than there were competing if they had two or three other sports,” Maryland Terrapins team physician and assistant orthopaedics professor Dr. James Dreese said. “It’s the hours of competition that puts them most at risk for having those problems.”

Some parents believe that specialization can help their children become stars, earning a college scholarship or even a pro career. Over the past decade, sports performance scientist Dr. Chris Stankovich said he has noticed more and more children beginning to specialize in one sport.
“Culturally speaking, more and more kids are seeing that a friend of theirs or a schoolmate is doing one sport year-round, so it kind of normalizes it,” Stankovich said.

More than 44 million children in the United States participate in youth sports, according a 2008 survey by the National Council of Youth Sports. But only about 6 percent of high school athletes go on to play football, baseball or soccer in college, according to the NCAA. About 3 percent play college basketball.

Specialization at a young age, however, can set young athletes up for serious injuries.
For example, the throwing arm of a young baseball player who specializes in pitching too early can undergo major structural changes.

“There are some pretty significant adaptive changes that take place in the throwing shoulder with regards to the way it rotates and the way in which it’s orientated that is most related to the hours of which the athlete is throwing. The younger they are, the more that adaptive change tends to be,” Dreese said.

Reggie Zayas, the commissioner of the Marlboro Boys & Girls Club and a travel league in Upper Marlboro, Md., said that about 40 percent of his kids specialize in baseball, usually by ages 9 or 10.
“(Kids on travel-select leagues are) falling behind the curve if they play multiple sports,” Zayas said. “If you try to play (football, basketball and baseball) … you’re falling behind the curve because there are so many kids just concentrating on one sport.”

Harry Hudson, the president of Henlopen Pop Warner and coach of the Cape Vikings pee-wee team in Lewes, Del., tells his players the same thing.

Hudson and his fellow coaches encourage kids under 12 to stay active and to participate in as many different sports as possible. But when they become teenagers, he advises them to consider specializing.

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