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Community Corner

Youth Sports & Hurt Kids

by Lisa Allen and Trish Drennan

Youth sports has become a religion of its own in our country, with an estimated 35 million kids between 5 and 18 currently playing an organized sport each year in the U.S. Washingtonians, with our wired-to-compete drive, are a big part of that mix. Despite the odds against our kids turning into the next athletic superstar – only 1 in 10,000 high school basketball players have a shot of making it in the NBA and 1 in 90 high school soccer players will receive a full ride to a D1 or D2 school – today’s generation of parents has turned youth sports into a $7 billion and growing industry.  

This obsession with having our kids “specialize” in a sport – playing it year round and spending thousands each year in skills training – comes at a price: increasingly unhealthy, broken young bodies. In 2012, an estimated 1.3 million children sustained a sports-related injury severe enough to send them to a hospital emergency room, according to the nonprofit group Safe Kids Worldwide. Sprains and strains, fractures, contusions, abrasions and concussions top the list of sports-related ER diagnoses for kids 6 to 19—at a total cost of $935 million-plus annually.

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If these statistics sound scary, they should. We think it’s time to start a new conversation, one that is less focused on boasting about our kids’ sports accomplishments and more focused on their health, safety and long-term fitness. 

Recreational and travel sports organizations are a full time business – their job is to make money by keeping your child hooked on the sport, year round. We have seen time and time again the repercussions of this single-sport mania – in the form of shoulder injuries in baseball players who are throwing too often, too hard for a body that is still growing; torn ACLs in soccer players who only spend their time playing soccer, dribbling and kicking over and over; ankle breaks in gymnasts who flip, back spring and land hard all day, all year. Today, it’s not uncommon for middle school and high school athletes to be completely sidelined by surgery and in full-time physical therapy.

Fortunately a cottage industry has developed to focus on injury reduction in young athletes. If your child is focused on a single sport, that skills and field strategy should be balanced by some level of attention to injury prevention and total body conditioning. Just as we wouldn’t let an eye doctor clean our teeth, we shouldn’t expect our kids’ coaches to be experts in enhancing, developing and protecting our athletes’ bodies.

So much new science, knowledge and technology is now available in the area of athletic development that old-school strategies should be questioned. Is your child just practicing and training in the sport or does he or she do strength and conditioning work to balance the skills work? Does his or her coach understand the importance of building a strong balanced body, which means paying attention to those areas not worked in their sport? Is the body worked as it does in sport, with appropriate attention to support stability as well as mobility? Are metrics measured that are not just sports specific (speed, strength) but also function based (flexibility, mobility)? Is the approach a “workout of the day” or a long-term progression that focuses on injury reduction and performance improvement?

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Back in our athletic days, when we played three sports a year and travel teams were only for Olympic hopefuls, this conversation would have seemed ludicrous. But back then, nearly no one we knew got hurt or spent a dime on PT, so the conversation has changed. And it must continue to be questioned and assessed if we want our children to be healthy and peak at the right time – high school and college – and not be out of the game or wracked by lifelong and debilitating injuries before they hit puberty.

 

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Lisa Allen and Trish Drennan are co-owners of BlackBench Fit, a fitness, nutrition and accountability based company in Ashburn, VA. Experienced trainers and businesswomen, Allen and Drennan have developed and taught more than 1,200 classes together. They share a passion for fitness trends, competitive racing, nutrition research, healthy cooking and helping others discover the gift of good health. Both are mothers to three children.

 

 

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