By Ken Reed

The unfortunate trend in youth and high school sports the last couple decades is toward specialization. Young athletes have increasingly chosen to focus on a single sport in their developmental years, often as young as eight or nine years old. (Perhaps more accurately, they’ve been strongly encouraged — some may say forced […]

By Ken Reed

Youth sports entrepreneurs want to get into parents’ pockets. And parents are afraid of their kids getting left behind in the youth sports rat race.

Greed and fear is a toxic combination and it’s hurting our young people.

J.J. Adams had an excellent feature article on this topic in the Vancouver […]

By Ken Reed

A University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health study has found that high school athletes that specialize in one sport sustain lower-extremity injuries at a significantly higher rate than athletes who don’t specialize in a single sport.

“While we have long believed that sport specialization by high school athletes […]

By Ken Reed

More and more kids — and in some cases, their parents — are finally getting fed up with the societal pressure to specialize in one sport at a young age.

These youngsters are saying they’ll specialize in college, or at least late in their high school career, but for the time being […]

By Ken Reed

Adults, parents, coaches and club sports administrators continue to push young athletes into one sport on a year-round basis, despite research highlighting the negatives of this specialization trend.

According to a Journal of Sports Sciences study, young athletes who competed in three sports at ages 11, 13 and 15 were significantly […]

By Ken Reed

The trend toward specialization in youth sports continues unabated. This despite a lack of evidence showing specialization improves athletic performance. In fact, the limited research available in this area tips the scale the other way: Kids that specialize in a single sport at an early age have less athletic development than do […]

By Ken Reed

Proponents of early specialization for young athletes are finding it harder and harder to support their case.

In a three-year longitudinal study at Loyola University in Chicago, highly specialized young athletes (focused on one sport for more than 8 months a year) had a 36 percent increased risk of suffering a serious […]

By Ken Reed

One of the negatives to evolve out of the explosion in club sports organizations for young people in this country is a disturbing trend of children specializing in a single sport at earlier and earlier ages. Club sports administrators and coaches are often driven by bottom line considerations: finding and keeping the […]

The trend in youth sports is to push kids to specialize in one sport as early as 10 years old. (See ““Can Sport Specialization Cause Youth Injuries?“). The result is a huge increase in injuries like anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tears and kids burning out on sports before they pick up their high school […]