Very interesting article about risk and sacrifices people make in pursuing sports.
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In many communities, youth sports now serve the role that places of worship used to serve. So it’s not surprising that families go to all ends.
But I’ve seen it end very badly. I think I’ve shared this before, but I have seen the following enough times that it is “a thing”: a father (for some reason it’s always a dad) obsessively tracking the vitals of their distance runner child and watching the pulse go down, down ,down. They will say something like “Ava is so fit, she has the pulse of an Olympian now, I can’t understand why her times are getting worse.” And then I have to explain that Ava’s pulse of 44 (or 35) isn’t due to fitness, but rather starvational bradycardia and that she needs to be admitted to the cardiology floor of the children’s hospital for continuous telemetry.
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I have a lower extremity Sports medicine practice that focuses on injury and prevention. I am in an area known as sports mecca. Parents will pay and do anything for their kids to succeed in sports, dance etc.
I have had parents get mad at me when little Jane shouldn’t go to the UK for the world’s Irish dancing championship just because Jane has three stress fractures and one occult fracture on her feet. But her coach told the 11 year old that he danced with 4, fractures… 
…
Or something is wrong with me when I tell the 13 year old baseball parents that he shouldn’t play 6 game’s on the weekend and of course pitch in like all with different teams that maybe he should do different sports to use different areas of your body. But yet with ligament ankle damage it’s my fault he didn’t pitch well.
Or the parents that pay for speed coaches, strength coaches and do on. Yes, some kid’s are talented. With all the dancers I treated only one went to Juliard. Many got college scholarships and many gymnastic kid’s got scholarships.
But 99%of them think they are playing division 1 and end up in D3 and many just stop due to burn out at 17.
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We know so many HS “athletes” that were seriously injured in their sports. Soccer players with multiple knee surgeries, football players needing back surgery, volleyball players with repeated concussions.
If parents paid a fraction of the costs for tutors and academic enrichment instead of travel teams, coaches, etc… these kids would have been eligible for huge merit awards.
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Now that my son has graduated from college, I can say this without jinxing him – he never had an injury!* No concussions, no knee injuries. Literally the only injury he had was a broken toe when he was in 5th or 6th grade.
Understand that the two doctors on the thread only see injured players, by definition. Which is not to say there isn’t a problem, but that their experience is skewed.
Besides conformation, perhaps one reason my son was uninjured is that I viewed his soccer playing as a marathon, not a sprint. So he took summers off from competitive soccer etc. Frankly this was more due to my belief that mental burnout was more of an issue than physical injury, although that was a factor in my thinking too.
*eta, I mean an injury with lasting consequences. Even then, the only more superficial injury I can think of was a knee laceration that needed 4 stitches.
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I’m not in an area known as a sports mecca and see this pretty regularly. D26 has been in her sport for 11 years now, verbally committed to continue at a D3 program (fingers crossed!). We’re the outliers in our area, as she doesn’t take private lessons or go to camps or clinics. We invested in sessions an injury prevention program at the local sports medicine practice and test prep.
I do wonder if she would have been a better athlete and had better recruiting prospects like D1 or Ivy had we thrown money at private coaching and such. Guess we’ll never know.
I was also a Dad coach for baseball and Tackle football. Really no injuries in either for the most part. Except one kid slid into second base and passed out. Had a syncope event. I asked a mother for some perfume. They asked why. I told her just get me some and put it under his nose and he came to.
Not amomia packs but it worked. Lol.
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Lol, the only surgery in our family was for me. I reaggravated a high school pitching injury playing catch with my daughter and had to have the elbow scoped to clean up the damage. Lots of scrapes and bruises. Had to shut down son’s pitching for 1 season during his growth spurt because of stress on growth plates. Daughter has a wicked scar on one of her knees when she slid into a base where the dirt underneath was like a rock and sliced up her knee badly. The worst part for the doctors was cleaning out all the dirt/little pebbles.
There is always an question on how much is nature vs nurture for top athletes, which is different by sport. Here is a great book on this subject. The Sports Gene - Wikipedia
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We live in a youth sports obsessed town. The amount of time and resources that parents dedicate to this is astounding. I mostly mean the pressure to join elite clubs and attend tournaments across the country every week. And only a handful of students get recruited by jr/sr year. Part of it is burn-out and maybe part of it is inherent talent that some kids just possess. Injuries can be devastating. It is also interesting to see how a single person (coach) can wield so much power in the whole process.
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My college soccer play too – the only injuries he had were non-sports related as a little kid – concussion from hitting his head while playing and stitches from a fall. As he got older, he always played multiple sports for fun, playing rec league basketball in college etc. Post-college, he has discovered he actually enjoys running now that it’s not conditioning for his sport and has become a serious runner.
As a family, we made some sacrifices, mostly in terms of my time, for him to pursue college recruiting. If there’d been competitive teams closer to us, we probably would have felt pressure to do more, but the closest MLS program was 3 hours away so we didn’t go down that road. Kid played four years in college, made life-long friends and memories, and walked away still loving his sport.
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D26 is 100% nurture as there is no inherited athleticism from her parental units, much to her chagrin.
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As a life long athlete and endurance coach (and parent of college and high school athletes), I suspect the majority of the parents driving their kids to the ground are not serious athletes themselves. Once you have the experience and knowledge, you are smart about the approach to your children’s sport “career” and know that 2 things are key: (1) don’t specialize early- which I know is a hard sell these days; and (2) there is no such thing as an elite athlete at age 8, 10 or 12, so let them have fun first.
I also believe certain people are better suited for certain sports. But if you specialize too early, you never get to find out, and no amount of private coaching will get them to their full potential if they are in the “wrong” sport. It’s tricky because often times they can get “good enough” in the sport that isn’t a perfect match. I have 2 swimmers but know that one is a much more talented land athlete - and my bet is that that child will change sports later in life.
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Actually that is not the case. I do lots and lots of well child checks and sports physicals too.
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I stand corrected! 
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There are some. Marshall Manning is 12 I think, and I read he’s going to a sports boarding school in TN this year. I’m pretty sure football is his sport, although I know he does play baseball too (my nephew reffed one of his games).
A lot of the Colorado Avs players’ kids played lacrosse for my brother’s teams, but their main sport was hockey. My daughter went to hockey camp with Joe Sakic’s son. I will say the hockey players don’t always play in the most competitive leagues when they are little (thus Joe’s son playing with my daughter at a camp for regular kids not superstars),
IMO, yes, because her exposure would have been greater. My daughter didn’t play on the travel teams or the expensive camps because I just couldn’t afford it. One of her classmates did (like $10k per season travel team) and she did get better, but didn’t want to play in college anyway. Her brother was a top ranked jr tennis player, and they all did competitive ski racing, so sports were important to that family.
I think my daughter would have had better exposure with different youth league teams, coaching, and tournaments, but nothing was going to change that she was still very small when she was being recruited as a 15-16 year old. She had a growth spurt as a freshman in college, and doing regular weight lifting that year also helped, but that didn’t make her a 5’8" player (pretty much the average for her sport) or put 25 pounds on her.
Some sports do need more training, or year round training to make it in college. Swimming seems to be one where just swimming for the high school or summer swim club isn’t enough to get you recruited.
Almost all pro Athletes play(ed) a lot of sports. Many football players also played baseball or basketball, even in college. Many play golf. Mookie Betts is a champion level bowler.
Confounding the risk/reward analysis is that debilitating physical issues might not occur while still a competitive athlete. Osteoarthritis may occur years or decades later, and only after the fact be connected to high levels of youth or early adult training. A joint injury might appear minor before the extra wear that comes with time.
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With good training, coaching and practice, you can get pretty good in many, if not most sports, even to a recruitable level. But elite D1 and pro level athletes almost always have some significant physical advantage. Crossing paths with various college softball teams at the airport, the players are pretty Amazonian. When S went to an academic showcase, he was one of the top pitchers throwing in the mid 80’s. At 5’10" 150, he was avg sized. The next week at the Stanford camp, the top pitchers were in the 90’s and you had kids 6’ 180+ lbs playing middle infield. Different ball game.
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I’m a cynic about the state of youth sports today. Thankfully, both my kids were only middling athletes, so while they participated in various sports, including in HS, (and got a lot of benefits from it) I was never tempted to go down the rabbit hole of the youth sports industrial complex. Often, I found that adults ruined youth sports for their kids with hyper competitiveness, sideline coaching and other bad behavior. It’s too bad because I think youth sports offer so many benefits, but I can see why many have been turned off. For many kids, parents would be better off spending the $$ they put into private coaching/travel teams etc. towards a college savings account because for most sports the amount of scholarship money is negligible - probably not coming close to the amount that was spent on prepping their kiddo.
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In addition to the economic cost of travel teams (fees, uniforms, travel, private lessons), we saw a lot of kids and parents get themselves into a state where the sport becomes all consuming. Academics are put to the side so that they are not prepared for college even if they are recruited. My D got grief because she always brought her text books on the bus for long away games. I have mentioned this elsewhere, out of the 8 teammates who made it to the next level (2 D1’, 2 D2’, 2 Jucos, 1 NAIA and 1 D3) only 3 girls graduated and played all 4 years. Many of these girls were woefully unprepared for college.
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