More Sports, Less Injury? Rethinking Youth Athletics for Long-Term Success
I recently had a school assignment in which I had to pull a paper on an aspect of youth strength and conditioning. I chose a literature review by McLellan et al. (2022) examining the existing research on youth sports specialization, specifically looking at elite athletes, those who competed beyond the college level, and whether they played multiple sports or focused exclusively on one during their youth. For clarity, the literature often divides youth training into pre-pubertal and post-pubertal phases.
Through conversations with many of my clients, a common belief emerges: that early specialization in a single sport, especially before puberty, leads to better performance and a higher chance of future success at the collegiate or professional level.
At first glance, that idea makes intuitive sense. The more time you spend practicing a specific skill, the better you get at it, right? And yes, there's some short-term evidence: kids who focus on one sport early on may demonstrate greater skill in that sport during early development years.
But what does the long term data say?
Interestingly, it suggests the opposite. The review by McLellan et al. highlights that multi-sport engagement during youth, followed by later specialization (after puberty), is associated with better long term athletic performance. Even more compelling: early specialization significantly increases the risk of burnout and overuse injuries with some studies showing overuse injury risk greater than 50% (DiFiori et al., 2013), leading to lost playing time or early dropout from sport.
So here’s the bigger question:
Beyond injury prevention and burnout, how does playing multiple sports, such as football, hockey, basketball, soccer, lacrosse, actually make you a better athlete in your primary sport later on?
After all, each sport has different rules, equipment, surfaces, and teammate numbers. How does this diversity lead to better adult performance?
The answer lies, in part, less about the nature of the skill of the sport, and more about the way we practice, and a different way of thinking about practice. Practice through the lens of the ecological approach.
The Ecological Approach
It’s part of the lore surrounding Patrick Mahomes that he was a talented pitcher in high school. In fact, he was drafted by the Detroit Tigers in the 2014 MLB Draft. Mahomes has often credited his background in baseball, especially the varied arm angles he used as a pitcher, for contributing to his creativity and adaptability as an NFL quarterback. In motor learning, this is referred to as transfer; the influence of previously practicing a skill on the performance of learning a new skill.
It seems logical. Both sports require throwing a ball with varying speeds and to different targets. But what if Mahomes had only thrown darts instead of baseballs? That’s a throwing skill, too… so what’s the difference?
Open vs. Closed Skills
The difference lies in the nature of the skill. Throwing darts is what we call a closed skill: the performer controls the timing, meaning they get to decide when to initiate the movement, they don’t have to have their movement interact with another person or object's movement, and the environment is predictable. Think: a golf putt, a free throw, or tossing a dart. There's no opponent or obstacle of some kind interfering with the timing of performing the movement.
In contrast, open skills involve responding to unpredictable, dynamic, changing conditions. Throwing a football pass involves reading defensive pressure and timing a throw to a moving receiver. Pitching in baseball involves adjusting for the batter, the count, and even the weather.
Here’s the problem:
In youth sports, we often train open skill sports using closed skill methods.
We teach dribbling around cones that don’t move
We hit balls off a tee instead of a pitch
We throw passes through tires hung from trees
While these drills can help build basic mechanics and comfort with equipment, they fail to develop the most important aspect of skilled performance: the ability to perceive and act in response to a dynamic environment. Practicing in a manner that separates the performer from the actions they need to perform in the context in which they actually take place only slow down skill development in the long term.
Why the Ecological Approach Matters
The ecological approach explains that skill emerges from the interaction between the individual, the task, and the environment (Davids et al., 2008). In this framework, learning happens when athletes are placed in environments that demand real-time decision making, perception, and adaptability.
Take batting practice: Hitting off a tee may be helpful for a first time player, but long-term development requires reading the pitcher’s body language, timing the swing, and adjusting based on pitch location, none of which are trained in closed environments.
This is where playing multiple sports becomes invaluable. It exposes kids to a form of variable practice, different movement challenges, game structures, sensory cues, and social interactions, which builds a more adaptable, perceptive, and resilient athlete.
The variety of movement contexts enhances what’s sometimes referred to as general athleticism: a blend of cognitive and physical qualities like speed, strength, coordination, anticipation, and decision-making.
What Really Matters
If we want to develop more resilient, creative, and adaptable athletes, we need to consider allowing children to participate in multiple sports, and then move beyond rote drills and robotic repetition during practice embracing an ecological approach. The ecological approach gives us a framework for doing just that, developing the critical timing and information processing necessary for success by designing training that reflects the real, unpredictable, dynamic nature of sport.
References:
Davids, K., Button, C., & Bennett, S. (2008). Dynamics of skill acquisition: A constraints-led approach. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
DiFiori, J. P., Benjamin, H. J., Brenner, J. S., Gregory, A., Jayanthi, N., Landry, G. L., & Luke, A. (2014). Overuse injuries and burnout in youth sports: A position statement from the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 48(4), 287–288. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2013-093299
McLellan, M., Allahabadi, S., & Pandya, N. K. (2022). Youth Sports Specialization and Its Effect on Professional, Elite, and Olympic Athlete Performance, Career Longevity, and Injury Rates: A Systematic Review. Orthopaedic journal of sports medicine, 10(11), 23259671221129594. https://doi.org/10.1177/23259671221129594