If you haven’t seen it yet, you might want to check the New York Times Magazine article called “Arms-Control Breakdown.” This piece chronicles the alarming rise in surgeries in youth sports, baseball in particular. It’s a story of wildly inverted priorities: consistently putting competitive outcomes ahead of player’s health. It’s about overuse, pitch counts and league rules, but it’s really about a culture gone insane, favoring victory over health and ambition over balance. Our relationship with sports and youth sports in particular has become a cultural obsessive-compulsive disorder. We would be right to call it a form of socially-accepted child abuse, except that we, as adults, treat ourselves in a similar fashion, driving ourselves far past the point of balance.
The rising tide of athletic injury, especially in youth sports, points up the stupidity of sporting specialization. Instead of pushing ourselves to perfect arbitrary physical movements like pitching, we might do better to teach a complete package of physical education skills, especially those that are related to the history of the human body.
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Right on with that……….I train/coach in a handful of communites that fall guilty to this specialization syndrome. To me, it seems as silly as riding your bike with no helmet on………..”have fun with that brain injury” was one of my comments not long ago.
My Mother urged me late in my Highschool years, to be an athlete, not just a soccer player. Again she was right, and it kills me, but I try to share the wisdom with my clients, so they can teach their kids.
“It’s an outside play day”
Richard Manlifter