These kids are ticking time bombs

Sunday, July 21st, 2019

Players are physically broken down by the time they reach the NBA:

In a series of studies in 2017 and 2018, a team of researchers working with the University of Wisconsin’s David Bell, a professor in its Department of Kinesiology’s Athletic Training Program and the director of the Wisconsin Injury in Sport Laboratory, found that while most youth athletes today believe specialization increases their performance and chances of making a college team, the majority of those who reached Division I level didn’t classify as highly specialized at the high school level. Jayanthi and a team of fellow researchers had reached a similar conclusion in a separate 2013 study. (The classification of “highly specialized” was granted to athletes who answered “yes” to the following three questions: Can you identify your primary sport? Do you play or train in that sport for more than eight months of the year? Have you ever quit one sport to focus on a primary sport?)

But while the upsides of specialization are unclear, there are few doubts about the downsides.

A separate 2016 study from Bell and his team found that 36% of high school athletes classified as highly specialized, training in one sport for more than eight months a year — and that those athletes were two to three times more likely to suffer a hip or knee injury.

Tennis faces a similar situation:

Players kept dropping out — that’s all Jayanthi knew for sure. It was happening at four prestigious national tournaments for elite tennis players ages 12-18. There, players who played more than four matches — often at least one per day over a span of four consecutive days — were more than twice as likely to pull out of the tournament before their fifth match for medical reasons than those who didn’t advance that far.

Soon thereafter, they examined about 530 high-level tennis players aged 12 to 18 in the Midwest. One of the first findings was the majority of these athletes — about 70% — had specialized in tennis, and the average age that they’d begun doing so was 10 years old. They also found that those who had begun specializing in tennis at a young age were 1.5 times more likely to report an injury than those who hadn’t specialized. One year later, they began what would become the largest clinical study of its kind, following about 1,200 young athletes — the average age was 13 and a half — across all sports in the Chicago area for up to three years. Roughly two-thirds of that group had visited local sports medicine clinics with injuries; the other third were uninjured and attended primary care clinics, largely for annual sports physicals. The goal: compare the injured to the uninjured, over a period of three years, and see what the numbers revealed.

Their conclusion: Those who were highly specialized in one sport (at the exclusion of other sports) and played it year-round were at a significantly higher risk for serious overuse injuries, such as bone and cartilage injuries and ligament injuries. How much higher of a risk? About 125%.

Comments

  1. AM826 says:

    “There, players who played more than four matches — often at least one per day over a span of four consecutive days — were more than twice as likely to pull out of the tournament before their fifth match for medical reasons than those who didn’t advance that far.”

    In fact, player still in a tournament are infinitely more likely to pull out of a tournament than players that had already been eliminated. Because the eliminated ones are already not playing the next match and therefore can’t pull out.

  2. Lu An Li says:

    Those itty bitty girl gymnasts above all. Bodies still growing the whole time and practicing as they do with injuries that they are told to ignore and keep going. It would be interesting to see what sorts of ailments they suffer from as they age.

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