Want to be a sport star? Don’t specialise as a youngster

By T.A.W.

MANY parents who want their child to achieve sporting greatness adhere to a mantra popularised by the journalist Malcolm Gladwell: it takes 10,000 hours of training to become an expert in a certain field. They make their child practise one thing from the youngest age possible, and then do so again and again. Tiger Woods (pictured) began playing golf before the age of two. He is far from alone. In 2008, the year Mr Woods won his last major, 12% of Americans aged six or less were playing organised sport, up from 9% in 1997, when he won his first. Yet a growing body of research suggests that specialisation—the intense, year-round practice of a single activity at the expense of others—is dangerous for the youngest athletes, while picking a sport later on is in fact more likely to lead to an elite athletic career.

Focusing on one sport as a youngster greatly increases the risk of injury. A study produced by the University of Wisconsin in November 2016 found that high-school athletes who specialised sustained 60% more new lower-body injuries in a year than did those who played a range of sports. That gap still existed after controlling for gender, age and sport; more than a third of football, softball, volleyball, basketball and tennis players considered themselves specialists. These results are consistent with other research. A paper published by academics at Loyola University in 2012 that summarises the risks in various sports mentions that young tennis specialists are 1.5 times more likely to do damage to themselves than generalists are, while the odds of injury triple for youth baseball pitchers that complete 100 innings in a year.

Striplings that specialise also have a higher risk of burnout. They practise the same sport relentlessly, which can leave them fatigued and stressed in their early teenage years: the Loyola University paper cites evidence of psychological problems among junior gymnasts, swimmers and tennis players. Premature specialisation also increases the chances of teenagers quitting their sports altogether, weighed down by years of arduous training and less freedom than their friends.

Those who keep up a variety of activities tend to have better careers, too. David Epstein, the author of “The Sports Gene”, has shown that the children who become sport stars tend to do fewer hours a week of serious practice in their eventual discipline than those who don’t quite make it. Collectively, elite performers only put in the extra shifts in their late teens. Similarly a study from Denmark found that “near-elite” athletes tended to start their sporting careers earlier than did those who became the real deal, who had done less training as adolescents but had surged ahead by their twenties. Research in the Soviet Union suggested that early specialisation was linked to athletes peaking and quitting earlier.

Athletes who pick a single sport later have longer to try a range of them—which means they can pick the one that is the best fit, rather than a discipline that they have been ushered towards by early growth or ambitious parents. They can also benefit from new skills learned in other games. Novak Djokovic has credited his flexibility and rapid movement on the tennis court to his years skiing. Conversely, those who knuckle down prematurely are at risk of limiting their motor-skill development, according to a 2015 paper, which recommends “more opportunities for free, unstructured play” and “periodised strength and conditioning” to promote movement and limit injury.

In spite of these findings, professional teams are pursuing the best underage talent ever-more aggressively. Premier League football clubs reportedly scout players as young as five; FC Barcelona’s famed youth academy has a team of children born in 2009. These programmes risk selecting players who are merely the most physically developed. This is one of the contributing factors to the “relative age effect”, whereby professional athletes are more likely to be the oldest—and therefore the biggest—in their age groups. Players in the National Hockey League are 60% more likely to have a birthday in January (the first month for each Canadian age-group) than one in March. In Premier League football academies, 45% are born between September (the cut-off for age-group teams in the UK) and November, while only 10% are born between June and August.

Surprisingly, the same bias exists even once players approach adulthood. A study in 2011 found that baseball players who were young for their draft classes—even by a few months—tended to go on to outperform the average production from the slots where they were chosen. Their older counterparts generally performed worse than expectations.

This research has significant implications. Not only is so-called “tiger parenting” a recipe for a joyless childhood—it is detrimental to a youngster’s chances of later success. Rather than the model of Mr Woods, a better template for how to mould future stars might be AB de Villiers: one of the world’s leading cricket batsmen, who earlier excelled at tennis, rugby and golf, and only focused on cricket later in his teenage years.

Pushy parents and coaches might also look to the cautionary tale of Nick Kyrgios, a mercurial Australian tennis player who gave up his beloved basketball at the age of 14. In 2014 a 19-year-old Mr Kyrgios burst onto the scene by beating Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon and toppling Roger Federer the year after in Madrid. He is arguably the most talented player of his generation, and has the potential to win many grand slams once Mr Djokovic and Andy Murray, who are both approaching 30, retire. Yet Mr Kyrgios has also publicly declared his dislike of the game and his reluctance to train. He has twice been accused of “tanking” during matches, out of boredom as much as anything, and he has pulled out of next month’s Rotterdam Open to play in the NBA All-Star Celebrity game in New Orleans. His poor attitude is largely to blame. But specialisation might be too.