Ask almost any high school coach whether kids should play multiple sports, and many will enthusiastically say yes. Then look at the off-season calendar and you soon begin to understand why the three-sport high school athlete has increasingly come to feel like a relic from another era. This all makes sense when you see how much harder the modern sports calendar can make it for an athlete who wants to play three different sports. The reality is every sport you can think of today now offers year-round training and competition, leaving kids in tricky positions when trying to play multiple sports throughout the year. These endless options for kids can also lead to mental health pressures, especially when trying to keep every coach pleased.
The reasons why so many kids specialize in one sport today
Sports are no longer confined to the traditional 3-4 months when they are “in season.” Today, the baseball player may have fall workouts, winter lifting, indoor hitting, pitching programs, camps and summer baseball. Basketball has open gyms, off-season workouts and AAU. Football has weight training, seven-on-seven, camps and summer practices. Soccer and volleyball have extensive club seasons.
While nobody necessarily tells the athlete, “You can’t play another sport,” they don’t have to. Why? Because kids aren’t choosing among three sports, they are choosing among three year-round programs.
Perhaps one of the most interesting words in modern high school athletics is optional. An off-season workout may technically be optional, but when your teammates are attending, your coach is watching and someone else wants your position, the word “optional” no longer sounds like a voluntary decision devoid of potential negative consequences. In fact, it’s quite the opposite that kids pick up on — if you don’t attend “optional” workouts, you will pay a price for that decision. When kids feel this way, it creates anxiety and leaves them in impossible situations trying to find ways to play multiple sports throughout the year.
There is an important psychological distinction between truly having a choice and feeling like you have a choice. The problem isn’t necessarily created by bad coaches with unreasonable intentions. In many cases, coaches are responding rationally to the competitive environment around them, as well as some parent expectations. If a neighboring soccer program is training throughout the winter, your program feels pressure to do the same. If basketball players are competing in AAU throughout the spring and summer, taking several months off may feel like falling behind. As other schools and leagues do more, everyone else does the same.
Eventually, we have something resembling an athletic arms race. And the casualty may be the multi-sport athlete.
Different sports require different skills, movements and ways of thinking. Baseball demands patience and the ability to handle a lot of individual failure. Basketball requires constant movement, immediate decision-making and continuous interaction with teammates on the floor. Football requires athletes to accept highly specialized roles while functioning within a larger coordinated system.
There are mental health benefits to playing different sports as well. Playing multiple sports exposes kids to different teammates, coaches, leadership styles and social environments. Perhaps most importantly, it allows kids to occupy different roles. The star midfielder in soccer might come off the bench in basketball. The starting quarterback might simply be another player on the baseball team. There is something developmentally valuable about sometimes being the best player in the room — and sometimes clearly not being the best player in the room.
Multiple sports can also broaden an athlete’s personal identity. When a teenager’s entire world becomes I am a football player, struggles in football can threaten something much larger than athletic performance. Playing other sports provides additional friendships, experiences and opportunities to feel competent. These broadened experiences and relationships also contribute to better mental health, too.
None of this means young athletes should be prohibited from specializing in a chosen sport if they so desire. Some kids genuinely love one sport and want to pursue it year-round. But we should also ask whether we’re making that choice for others without realizing it. It’s easy for coaches and athletic programs to say they support multi-sport athletes. The more meaningful question is whether their expectations, schedules and off-season demands actually make multi-sport participation possible.
Perhaps the multi-sport athlete isn’t disappearing because kids suddenly stopped wanting to play multiple sports. Maybe we’ve simply built a sports culture in which every sport increasingly wants to be the athlete’s only sport.
Final thoughts
Perhaps the real issue isn’t whether the three-sport athlete is actually disappearing, but whether we’re making it unnecessarily difficult for that athlete to exist. We continue to praise the benefits of playing multiple sports while simultaneously creating year-round (“optional”) expectations that make doing so increasingly challenging. If we truly value multi-sport athletes, then coaches, schools, parents, and sports organizations may need to do more than simply encourage them — we need to create an environment that actually allows them to play.
drstankovich.com
