One Sport Year-Round Is Dangerous. Three sports year-round should Fix It.

Recently I posted something on twitter (I refuse to call it X) that said:

“Tell kids to play multiple sports because ‘it’s not good to play one sport year-round’ — which results in them playing multiple sports year-round.”

I knew exactly what the reaction would be.

I occasionally post things like that as a little social experiment, mostly to re-prove something to myself: people have a really hard time stepping outside of an established paradigm long enough to look at the problem that is actually in front of them.

“Kids should play multiple sports” has become one of those things we’re all supposed to agree with.

And for the record, I agree with it.

Multiple sports are a great idea.

When sports have seasons.

That last part matters.

The Advice Hasn’t Changed. Amateur Sports Have.

The traditional argument against early specialization makes plenty of sense.

A kid plays football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring. Different movements. Different skills. Different teammates and coaches. When one season ends, another begins.

Great.

But that’s increasingly not how youth sports work.

The seasons don’t really end anymore.

Basketball players can start practicing in the fall once they hit junior high, assuming they aren’t playing football. The school season can run into March.

Then AAU starts.

Meanwhile, if that same kid also loves baseball, baseball has already started.

So now he’s not transitioning from basketball to baseball.

He’s playing basketball AND baseball.

Practicing for both. Playing games for both. Traveling for both. Trying to fit strength training around both.

And because Mom and Dad paid for both, he’s gonna do both.

It’s like paying for a huge meal and getting full halfway through. You know you don’t need the rest of it, but you paid for it, so you keep eating.

Only we’re doing it with kids’ schedules and bodies.

I’ve Watched This Happen in Real Life

I’ve seen eighth graders practicing football in May while simultaneously trying to practice baseball, play baseball games, and work out for baseball.

Think about that for a second.

Football season is months away.

Baseball season is happening.

But because football has an “offseason program,” the kid is effectively participating in two sports at once.

I’ve seen the same thing with volleyball.

A girl does an offseason workout in the morning with her high school volleyball team. Then that evening she goes to her club volleyball team.

Half of them are going to basketball practice in the afternoon between those two practices.

And then the club coach programs the session as if nothing happened that morning.

To Make a comparison for the baseball people out there. In volleyball and basketball the ACL is the UCL. It’s the injury everyone is scared of.

An ACL tear is like what we refer to as “Tommy John“ in Baseball.

Jumping in volleyball and basketball has to be monitored just like pitch counts. Can you imagine a baseball player pitching in three different practices in one day?

People would lose their minds, but it happens all the time with volleyball girls.

Conditioning. Jumping. Practice. More work.

From each individual coach’s perspective, the workload might look perfectly reasonable.

The high school coach sees one workout.

The club coach sees one practice.

The strength coach sees one lifting session.

The private instructor sees one lesson.

The parent sees a bunch of things their kid committed to.

The kid’s body sees all of it.

That’s the part we’re missing.

The Body Doesn’t Care What Jersey You’re Wearing

This is where I think the conversation about specialization and overuse has become way too simplistic.

We tend to think:

One sport year-round = bad.

Multiple sports = good.

But physiology doesn’t work that way.

Your body doesn’t look at the schedule and say:

Don’t worry. The first two hours were baseball and these next two are basketball. Totally different sport. Reset the fatigue counter.

Stress is stress.

Running is running.

Jumping is jumping.

Throwing is throwing.

Lifting is lifting.

Sleep lost because you got home late from a game is still sleep lost.

The important question isn’t simply:

How many sports does this kid play?

It’s:

What is the total workload being placed on this kid across ALL of his sports and training?

Those are two very different questions.

We Turned “Don’t Specialize” Into “Do Everything”

I think this is the unintended consequence nobody wants to talk about.

We spent years telling parents that specialization was dangerous and that kids should be multi-sport athletes.

Parents listened.

But at the same time, every individual sport expanded its calendar.

There are offseason workouts.

Preseason workouts.

Open gyms.

Fall baseball.

Spring football.

Club volleyball.

AAU basketball.

Travel baseball.

Showcases.

Camps.

Private lessons.

Strength programs.

Speed programs.

And somehow we’ve arrived at a place where the supposed solution to kids playing one sport 12 months a year is for them to play two or three sports 12 months a year.

How exactly is that automatically better?

This Isn’t an Argument for Specialization

This is where people will inevitably misunderstand what I’m saying.

I’m not arguing that 11-year-olds need to pick a sport and abandon everything else.

I’m saying we need to stop treating “multi-sport athlete” as a magic phrase that automatically means healthy development.

Playing multiple sports can be fantastic.

But there needs to be some transition between them.

There need to be times when the volume comes down.

There need to be days when a kid isn’t reporting to two different coaches who both believe they’re entitled to 100% of him.

And somebody — parent, coach, trainer, somebody — has to look at the kid’s total workload instead of only the workload they’re personally responsible for.

That requires communication and, occasionally, restraint.

Coaches Have to Be Willing to Give Something Up

This is probably the hardest part.

Every coach believes his program is important.

And he’s probably right.

The problem is that six individually reasonable commitments can combine into one completely unreasonable schedule.

Sometimes the responsible coaching decision is not figuring out how to squeeze one more workout into the week.

It’s saying:

“You’ve already done enough today. Go home.”

If a baseball player has football workouts that morning, maybe his baseball workload needs to change that afternoon.

If a volleyball player has already trained with her school team, maybe the club coach doesn’t need to condition her again that night.

If a kid just finished a long basketball season and wants to play baseball, maybe he doesn’t also need to immediately begin an aggressive AAU schedule.

That isn’t being soft.

That’s managing an athlete.

Maybe We’re Asking the Wrong Question

Instead of arguing endlessly about whether kids should specialize or play multiple sports, maybe the better questions are:

How many hours per week is this kid actually training?

How many competitive games is he playing?

How many high-intensity throwing, sprinting, or jumping exposures is he getting?

When does he recover?

When does he sleep?

When is there a period during the year when the demands actually decrease?

And perhaps most importantly:

Does anybody involved know everything else this kid is doing?

Because if the baseball coach doesn’t know what the football coach is doing, the football coach doesn’t know what the private trainer is doing, and the trainer doesn’t know the kid played six basketball games over the weekend, then nobody is actually managing the athlete.

They’re only managing their little piece of him.

Kids Should Play Sports

That’s ultimately what I want.

Play baseball.

Play football.

Play basketball.

Play volleyball.

Try different things. Learn different skills. Compete. Have fun.

But let’s stop pretending the number of sports listed next to a kid’s name tells us whether his training schedule is healthy.

Multiple sports aren’t the problem.

One sport isn’t automatically the problem either.

The problem is that we’ve created a youth sports culture where increasingly every sport wants to be a year-round sport.

Then we stack them on top of one another and act surprised when kids are exhausted, hurting, or burned out.

So yes, I’m going to keep telling kids who want to play multiple sports to play multiple sports.

But somebody has to be willing to say the other half out loud:

If we’re going to encourage kids to play multiple sports, we have to allow those sports to have seasons again.

A Few Things Before I Close

Before I close this, I want to leave you with three things.

1. There’s an elephant in the room.

For some of you reading this, there will be an elephant in the room: I, Michael Richards, own Elite Athletic Performance and make my living as a private coach.

Private coaches are just as guilty as anybody else in this equation.

One of the things I’ve always prided myself on is that everything we do here is customizable. I have a plan for every athlete, no matter what they’ve done earlier in the day or what they’ll be doing later that evening with their teams or at other practices.

I have also never shied away from saying that EAP can best serve the athlete who does not wish to play any sport other than baseball.

I’ve always told those athletes: If you only want to play baseball, your second sport is training at EAP.

We’re going to make sure you get the different movements and physical development you need to stay athletic and healthy while playing the sport you love.

2. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I’m still waiting to meet the “specialization” bad guy.

I’ve been doing this in some capacity for 25 years, and to this day I have never heard one single person tell a young athlete to “specialize.”

For those of you close to my age, remember when we were growing up and everybody had heard about razor blades being put in Halloween candy?

Did you know there’s never been a documented case in which that happened?

The whole “specialization” thing sometimes feels similar to me.

There aren’t bad guys lurking in dark alleys saying:

“Hey kid, you should specialize in that one sport. All the cool kids are doing it. First one’s free, kid.”

Yet we talk about specialization as if there’s an army of coaches actively trying to convince 10-year-olds to quit every other sport.

In my experience, that simply isn’t what is happening.

3. If playing one sport is inherently so bad, explain the Dominican Republic.

If a kid playing one sport is inherently so bad for him, why are kids from the Dominican Republic so good at baseball?

Baseball is deeply ingrained in the culture there, and many of those kids spend an enormous amount of time playing it from a young age.

If playing one sport caused injuries at anything close to the rate people sometimes make it sound like it does, you’d have to wonder how any of those kids ever make it out of there.

Yet they do.

And some of them become the best baseball players in the world.

That doesn’t prove that specialization is good, and it doesn’t mean workload doesn’t matter.

Actually, I think it reinforces the entire point of this article:

Maybe the number of sports a kid plays was never the most important variable in the first place.

Maybe we should spend a little less time counting sports and a little more time paying attention to what the kid is actually doing.