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Click on the article titles below to go straight to the article listed...
| Nov 2008 | Parenting My Champion: Developing Talent |
| Oct 2008 | Improvement's Tortuous Path |
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Featured article, December 2008
(from the Postive Coach Alliance and Michigan State University's Institute for the Study of Youth Sports collaboration on the Good Coaching Case Studies National Conversation)
Good Coaching Case Study: The Specialist -- June 2008
As practice is winding down, Coach Hastings motions you over for a private conversation about your child, who shows enough raw athletic ability to excel. Coach tells you your child has great potential but should specialize as soon as possible, eschewing other sports and training year-round, especially if you hope for a college scholarship for your child. Coach Hastings is a technically skilled coach who has had a number of athletes earn college scholarships.
- How do you respond?
- What considerations inform your decision?
- How, if at all, do you discuss this with your child?
- Would your response vary depending on the age of your child?
- Is there a certain age at which specialization makes the most sense?
Response by PCA Founder Jim Thompson
The comments on the PCA website about The Specialist are filled with insights, many based on personal experience with specialization. I encourage everyone reading this to check them out because they are well worth it. Thank you to all who took the time to share your thoughts with us all.
As I speak to groups of parents around the U.S., I am more often asked about the pressure they feel to encourage their child to specialize in one sport than any other issue. Often the question is asked in a way that suggests that the parents feel they have no choice but to acquiesce to the pressure, or their child will fall behind.
Here are some thoughts about dealing with the decision to specialize (or not):
1) It’s up to you. There is no one else who can advocate as well as you for what’s best for the child. It is up to parents to resist the pressure to specialize and step up to the responsibility of doing the right thing for their child. If we can’t resist pressure on behalf of our kids, when can we?
2) And your child. Depending on the age of your child, you will want to involve him in this decision. As writers below have noted, a young child may not be in a position to decide this, but even for a younger child, involving her in the discussion has to be a learning experience for her. She can see how you evaluate and discuss the coach’s statement and learn from you a little bit more about how to make good decisions. If the child is older, you absolutely will want to bring him into the conversation, even to the point of allowing him to make the decision after considering all the different aspects, pluses and minuses, etc.
3) Coach Conflict of Interest. Relying on the advice of a coach, no matter how successful or skilled he or she may be is inadequate. Coaches may have a conflict of interest that can skew their perceptions. A coach may want your child to specialize in his/her sport so much that it affects his/her judgment about what’s best for your child.
4) Multiple sports help. If your only goal is to shape your child into a great athlete (which is not a good idea!), you would have your child experience multiple sports. There are many examples of professional athletes who say their success in their ultimately-chosen sport was enhanced by their playing other sports until a pretty advanced age. General sports skills such as balance and game sense can be enhanced for an athlete’s ultimate sport by experience with other sports.
Another reason for exposing your child to multiple sports is because you don’t know which sport will catch his fancy to the point where he wants to stay with it for a lifetime.
5) The age of 12. Dan Gould of Michigan State’s Institute for the Study of Youth Sports says the problem isn’t specialization, but PREMATURE specialization. Most athletes who attain an elite level specialize at some point, but it is much later than many coaches and parents believe. The research indicates that for most sports, specialization before the age of 12 is not a good idea.
6) Dangers of specialization. While year-round focus on a single sport may speed up the acquisition of skills, there are dangers that can outweigh that advantage. Chief among these are burnout and repetitive stress injuries. Enjoyment makes it more likely that an athlete will be able to maintain the long-term commitment to a sport (something that is harder than it may seem) that is needed to reach elite status. And there are few activities that don’t get old when you do them all the time. Year-round specialization makes burnout more likely.
Repetitive stress injuries also increase with specialization, which then can undercut motivation. It’s hard to be as excited about a sport when it hurts to play the sport.
7) Child-Driven v. Adult-Driven. I would be much more open to specialization if the child is the one driving the decision. If a child says she wants to focus on a single sport year round, she is less likely to burn out, for example, than if she feels she has to do it to ensure a place on a team. Commitments freely entered into are more likely to be enjoyed than commitments one feels forced into making.
8) Your child’s chances. Tom Farrey in his new book Game On: The All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children cites the “jockocracy” of professional sports. So many professional athletes are the offspring of former professional athletes. The chances of your child becoming a professional athlete in the absence of physical gifts are not good. Recognize this and don’t put so many eggs in the pro career or college scholarship basket.
9) The good news. Helping your child have fun and learn life lessons from her sports experience is a good strategy whether she makes the pros or not. If an athlete loves playing his sport and has the talent to be a professional athlete, he will find his love of the sport a big asset. If your child doesn’t ultimately have the ability to go pro, at least she will not be deprived of the chance for a lifelong love of sports and physical activity. Focusing your emphasis on your child having a good time with sports and taking away life lessons will benefit him in any event.
-- Jim Thompson, PCA Founder
You can find more more info on this and other interesting subjects with USA Swimming's Successful Sport Parenting CD, an interactive CD with unique sections for parents, coaches and club administrators. The CD is aimed at enhancing the parent-coach-club triangle of support. Watch interviews with coaches, parents and athletes, learn from presentations and download documents on every topic involved in sport parenting. Parents: learn the “dos and don’ts” of sport parenting as well as how to support your athlete through all stages of athlete development and how to communicate with your child’s coach.
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Featured article, November 2008
(from USTA's Parenting My Champion: Developing Talent)
The US Tennis Association has developed a chart of guidelines for parents entitled "Parenting My Champion: Developing Talent." The chart shows three stages of development: Introduction/Foundation (ages 5-10), Refinement/Transitional (ages 10-14), and Elite Performance (15 and over). At each stage the USTA gives recommendations for things parents can do to encourage the child, keep things in perspective AND foster long term development and success.
“Parenting My Champion: Developing Talent”
Recommended Guidelines for Successful Sport Parenting
| INTRODUCTION/ FOUNDATION Phase One Age of Athlete: 4.5-9.6 Years in Phase: 5.1 |
REFINEMENT/ TRANSITIONAL Phase Two Age of Athlete: 10.6-14.6 Years in Phase: 4.0 |
ELITE PERFORMANCE Phase Three Age of Athlete: 15.4+ Years in Phase: NA |
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• Allow your child to dream big |
• Provide transportation, logistical & financial support |
• Be careful to care about your child as a person and not just as an athlete |
Click here for a PDF file of this chart. Many more documents for parents can be found in the Successful Sport Parenting CD.
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Featured article, October 2008
(from USA Swiming parents' section)
Improvement's Torturous Path
by Tom Slear
Special Splash Correspondent
Splash Magazine:May-June 2005
The unpredictable pattern of improvement among competitive swimmers is one of the sport’s most mystifying problems. The questions are many and the answers are few.
The feeling among coaches is nearly universal. It’s an odd mix consisting of equal amounts hope and caution. They don’t know quite what to make of their prodigies, the 9-, 10-, or 11-year-olds who seem to have it all – feel for the water, competitive drive, and the talent to adapt and improve technique.
They are almost too good to be true. Therein lies the hope. And very often, they are. That’s where the caution comes in.
“You wonder how much longer they will be around,” says John Collins, head coach of Badger Swim Club in Larchmont, N.Y. “If they are, will they be going anywhere nearly as fast (when compared to their peers)?”
It’s arguably the single most mystifying problem related to the development of swimmers. Why do some improve steadily and others plateau? Why isn’t the slope of an improvement curve predictable? Basic logic dictates that as swimmers get older, they should be bigger, stronger, better trained and therefore, faster. Improvement might not have a constant, positive slope – nothing in sport is that assured – but it should be steady over the long-term, with peaks of larger magnitudes than valleys.
However, those familiar with swimming know this is simply not the case. Improvement’s path contains detours and even U-turns. Many brilliant young swimmers plateau, and then, says Collins, who has coached three swimmers from age groupers to Olympians, the “window of opportunity closes. They are sure bets for the next year and the next year never comes. Kids expect to improve every year, and in many cases, that simply doesn’t happen.”
This unpredictability baffles coaches, infuriates parents and exasperates swimmers. It’s not a situation unique to swimming. All sports are littered with stories of hot shots whose competitive careers turn cold. Damon Bailey was labeled a can’t-miss basketball prospect as an eight grader by no less of a luminary than Bobby Knight, who was then the head coach at Indiana University.
Bailey went on to lead his high school to the Indiana state championship before a frenzied crowd of 41,000. He was the state’s Mr. Basketball and a consensus All-American. Then his stature began to slip. The best he did in college was make first team All-Big 10. He was picked 44th in the 1994 NBA draft and lasted only a year in the league. Even Bailey has admitted that his most enjoyable times as a basketball player were in high school.
“You will find that across sports, there is not much correlation between those who have success when they are 10 and 11 with those having success when they are 19 and 20,” says Dr. Thomas Raedeke of the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at East Carolina University. “It could be for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that when success comes early on and you are improving by leaps and bounds, you come to expect that. When it stops, and you are improving only fractionally, that can be very frustrating, especially when others you used to beat are improving more. It may cause you to question your commitment to the sport, which affects how hard you work and whether you continue to improve.”
Swimming has the added dimension of simplicity. The sport’s only element is speed, which can be measured objectively. Unlike team sports, where individual improvement is calculated by an equation of multiple variables, any one of which is as subjective as the meaning of justice, a swimmer’s progression can be evaluated to the hundredth of a second. It is the sport’s major plus and its most glaring minus. A tight end in football can unfailingly cobble together a logical path to improvement. If he begins to show a tendency toward dropping passes, then he can point to his more developed blocking. If his blocking shows signs of regressing, he can claim that the opposition is stronger.
The stopwatch prohibits swimmers from any such forgiving outtakes. You either did better or you didn’t. You’re either stepping forward or you aren’t. Childhood stars have the added burden of staying up with their peers. As one coach recalls hearing from a 14-year-old, “The people watching are laughing at me because I can’t even beat the records I set when I was 12.”
TOO FAST, TOO YOUNG
Like Collins, Dr. Genadijus Sokolovas, USA Swimming’s director of physiology, talks of missed windows of opportunity. He sees peak performances as a 10- to 12-year-old as a work in progress, beginning with preliminary preparation for those under the age of 10 and advancing through basic training (10-12), specialization (13-18, depending on gender and event), and peak performance somewhere around ages 18 to 20 (later for sprinters).
Patience is the key, according to Sokolovas. Rushing through any one of the stages – or skipping one altogether – might push swimmers ahead of their peers for a time, but it won’t lead to the ultimate goal of peak performances at full physical maturation.
The stages Sokolovas speaks of begin with the development of fundamental skills, flexibility and general endurance, and progress gradually to higher volumes of training with increased intensity. The concept is for swimmers to hold off on the tougher workouts until they are best equipped to handle them, thereby inducing the highest training value and the most overall improvement.
Very often, Sokolovas says, young swimmers who are ahead of their peer groups are pushed forward in the developmental cycle, with intensive, high-yardage training introduced too early. By the time they are most able physically to handle to the higher levels of training stress, they are on the downside of their adaptation cycle.
“If they are fast when they are young with a minimum of workload, that’s one thing,” says Sokolovas, “but if it’s because they are 10 and doing 7,000 yards a day, that’s something else. In that case, it’s not good to be too fast too young.”
In a study he authored, Sokolovas compared the swimmers in the best all-time, top-100 times for age groups from 10-and-under through 17-18. Among the 17- and 18-year olds, only 10.3 percent of the girls and 13.2 percent of the boys were listed in any event as 10-and-unders. When compared to the lists of 11- and 12-year-olds, the percentages were 20.3 for the girls and 12.6 for the boys. Not until the 15/16 age group did the percentages become significant – 49.7 for the girls and 53.5 for the boys. As Sokolovas concluded, “Most of the future elite swimmers swim slower than age-group champions, especially at ages until 15-16 years.”
“So many want to be successful right now,” Sokolovas says. “They don’t want to wait. They don’t understand that if their bodies have already adapted at age 12 to a high volume of training and intensity, there is little room for them to go. How can they improve?”
The outlook for young speedsters is not quite as bleak as Sokolovas’ study might indicate. His baseline of all-time top-100 times came from the national compilation done every year of the top-16 times from each of the age groups. In essence, Sokolovas looked at the all-stars of all-stars.
The top-16 rankings portray a significantly different picture. Of the 43 men and women on America’s 2004 Olympic team, 18 (42 percent) had a top-16 national ranking in either short-course yards or long-course meters as a 10-and-under. Among those were Michael Phelps and Aaron Peirsol, who set world records in Athens, and Jenny Thompson, who, at 31, competed in her fourth Olympic Games. Twenty-five of the 2004 Olympians – 58 percent – had a top-16 ranking as 11- and 12-year-olds.
Still, few within the swimming community question Sokolovas’ contention that too much too early can lead to too little later on. Susan (O’Brien) Williams swam at the 1980 Olympic Trials as a 14-year-old and did a 1:05 in the 100-meter backstroke. At the Olympic Trials eight years later she did a 1:03. Within that period, she endured three years without improving her time at all.
“I did too much when I was young,” she concedes. “From the time I was 12 until I was 14, I was doing nine practices a week. When I was 13, I did three practices a day over the Christmas holidays. Where could I go from there? It was not as if I could go from five practices a week to six or seven. I couldn’t do any more.”
“So what if you are great when you are swimming against other 10-year-olds?” she adds. “Who has the talent and desire has yet to be determined. It’s better to pace yourself. You want to be great when you are 16, 17 or 18.”
PEAKS AND VALLEYS
Properly timing a swimmer’s training development can be tricky. The rules apply generally, but when it comes to specifics, former world record holder and club coach Sue Anderson found herself repeatedly asking, “Am I doing the right thing for this kid?”
Anderson, the resource development specialist for USA Swimming, recalls two 12-year-old girls she coached at the Scarlet Aquatic Club in New Jersey during the 1990s. Both surpassed Junior National standards when they were 12. Anderson held one back from the senior group and didn’t send her to Junior Nationals the first year she qualified. Anderson pushed the other girl right along, both with training and competition. Neither developed fully as a senior swimmer.
“It’s not a science,” Anderson says. “The only science to it is that you can’t count your chickens when the swimmers are 10 and beating everyone else. It could be because they trained too much. It could be because they were physically more mature and after a few years, others in their age group will catch up. Or it could be because they have real talent for swimming and will continue to develop. You just never know.”
Raedeke agrees. Improvement is never a given, not in swimming or any other sport. Slumps are part of athletics. Their causes can be as hard to pin down as next month’s weather. Problems arise when mechanics or training routines are scrutinized too closely. Very often, neither is the major problem. Nevertheless, athletes, coaches and parents demand answers when all that is needed is patience.
“As you get further into a sport,” Raedeke says, “improvements are harder and harder to come by. We all know this, but when you are the one affected, you want to change things even though the best course of action might be to wait it out.”
Pat Hogan knows a thing or two about waiting it out. In 1996, a swimmer he coached at the Mecklenburg Aquatic Club in North Carolina, Jilen Siroky, made the U.S. Olympic team in the 200m breaststroke as a 14-year-old. Though she continued to swim through college, she never got within three seconds of the time she did in the final of 1996 Olympic Trials. This is not uncommon for girls whose bodies change dramatically in their early teens. Siroky’s started to change immediately after the Olympics.
“She wasn’t the same swimmer,” recalls Hogan, USA Swimming’s managing director for club development.
A change in stroke technique didn’t work, though emphasis on other strokes helped, allowing Siroky to experience once again the joy of improvement. However, she never achieved the level of accomplishment that she did in 1996.
And yet, as Hogan says, “I was as proud of her the years after the Olympics as I was when she made the Olympics. As hard as she worked going into 1996, it was no different in ’97 and ’98. She struggled, but that’s one of the great things about our sport. When you are not improving, you begin to question, ‘Why am I doing this?’ You learn to struggle, and that’s good for kids. They learn a lot. You can’t enjoy the peaks unless you go through the valleys.”