Sport analytics are everywhere these days, including youth sports. As new technologies emerge, athletes today can be measured and compared against one another on just about everything, including speed, quickness, velocity, and even spin rate on a baseball. While accumulating data allows for player comparisons and better future predictive accuracy (hopefully), increasingly more kids are feeling the negative effects of having their physical shortcomings suddenly become visible to everyone, and new expectations for future improvement that feel overwhelming. In fact, kids that I see in my office regularly tell me about their “measurables,” and the specific numbers they have to hit in the future in order to become a prospective college D1 athlete. It’s also not coincidental that many of these same kids struggle with anxiety, frustration, and depression from always being measured and feeling the pressure of having future analytical targets to hit.
Sport analytics and kids
As technology has advanced, so have sport analytics. The change from the “eyeball” test of an athlete, to now being able to objectively measure an athlete’s physical abilities has been controversial — even at the pro and college level. Critics argue that sport performance is not based exclusively on “measurables,” and that overlooking an athlete’s passion, drive, and resiliency misses the big picture while creating unnecessary anxiety. If this is how folks feel about sport analytics at the adult level, what do you think kids deal with when being pressured to improve their measurables?
While accumulating data allows for player comparisons and better future predictive accuracy (hopefully), increasingly more kids are feeling the negative effects of having their physical shortcomings suddenly become visible to everyone, and new expectations for future improvement that feel overwhelming.
Kids today don’t stay in recreational sports very long, evidenced by increasingly more families each year deciding to join a club or premier team in their child’s sport. These advanced teams practice more, play more, and measure kids more. Depending on the sport, a kid may be analyzed along a number of factors, including speed, strength, vertical jump, reaction time, shot accuracy, launch angle, and exit velocity to name a few. For kids, this can be an awful lot to contend with, especially when their data is matched against other kids, as well as mapped up against future benchmarks needed to simply be recognized by college coaches. As a result, many young athletes struggle with mental health issues, including anxiety and depression. In worst-case scenarios the pressure becomes too much, and some kids retire from sports prematurely as a result.
Sport analytics are here to stay, and there does not appear to be any evidence of less analytics occurring in youth sports — in fact, we see the opposite happening. As more “elite” teams pop up, and new technologies emerge, kids will likely be under the microscope even more in the future. Yes, analytics provide for objective data that can be used for many statistical comparisons, but is that the only thing we care about? Should a kid’s well-being be the primary focus, even if it means less testing of his or her physical abilities? What is the end game here — to train and measure kids exactly how we do with pro and college athletes? There is most definitely a cost using this approach, as sport analytics in youth sports are adding a lot of undue pressure to kids who simply want to play their sport.
Final thoughts
Sport analytics allow for objective data collection and valid comparisons between people, but questions still loom about both the predictive validity of analytics to sport performance, and the mental health issues that emerge when athletes (especially kids) believe their numbers simply don’t measure up. While an argument can be made that adult athletes competing in pro and college sports are mature enough to handle these kinds of stressors, most kids do not have the maturity and stress coping skills to deal with being scrutinized in this manner. Kids want to play, not feel like a lab rat running through tests while scientists measure their behaviors.
drstankovich.com
