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Sports

Young Multi-Sport Athletes Benefit From The Variety

As you attempt to guide your children through the modern minefield of youth sports, let them play whatever sports they want.

Any list of the best athletes ever to come out of Connecticut is going to include Rico Brogna, who played in the majors for nine seasons and twice drove in more than 100 runs. Brogna was born in Massachusetts but went to Watertown High School where he played football well enough to be recruited as a quarterback by Clemson.

He chose baseball. Years ago, Brogna told me something that has stayed with me.

“When I was in Philadelphia we all used to argue in the clubhouse about who was better in basketball or golf or football,” he said. “All the guys there had played other sports.”

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These are words worth remembering as you attempt to guide your children through the modern minefield of youth sports.

Of course, you don’t have to go all the way back to Brogna to find multi-sport stars. You can simply tell your kid to watch Maggie Sundberg at E.O. Smith, who is running track this spring after earning all-state honors in basketball.

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Or Allison Gallo from Tolland, who is a critical attacking force for the girls soccer team but plays basketball in the winter, which could easily be indoor soccer season. Ellington has Julie Gage and Kelly Conley, mainstays in basketball and lacrosse.

The list goes on and on. This is good. This is as it should be.

There are a host of reasons why playing multiple sports is beneficial. The most obvious are physical.

Back in 2009, Dr. James Andrews, the nation’s pre-eminent sports orthopedist, told the New York Times about the alarming increase in arm injuries among high-school age pitchers.

Andrews, who has operated on some of the most famous pitchers in the world, including Roger Clemens, John Smoltz and Steve Carlton, told the Times he had done 13 shoulder operations on teenagers in 2001 and 2002. Over the next six years he did 241. The numbers seeking so-called Tommy John elbow surgeries increased from nine in the years 1995 to 1998 to 224 from 2003 to 2008.

Young arms are not meant to pitch 200 innings but after high school baseball there is AAU and American Legion and fall baseball, too. The same is true in other sports. Soccer can lead to the overdevelopment of certain muscles, which eventually lead to injury. And the punishment from football, which modern medicine is bringing into sharper focus, is severe even without the additional hits of a spring AAU season.

There are also psychological tolls.

A lot of sports people like to quote “Outliers: The Story of Success,” Malcolm Gladwell’s non-fiction work that studies the factors of what one might call unusual success. We’re talking Bill Gates and Tiger Woods, here.

The most famous concept in the book is the so-called 10,000 hour rule, which suggests practicing a specific task for 10,000 hours (say 20 hours a week for almost 10 years) is the key to success. Gladwell refers to The Beatles and their all-night shows in Hamburg. He mentions Gates, who began working on a computer at 13 and never stopped. He might as well have mentioned Woods, who was hitting golf balls on “The Mike Douglas Show” at age four and playing exhibitions with Sam Snead when he was eight.

But Gladwell cherry-picked his examples.

Nowhere is there mention of Todd Marinovich, who once graced the cover of Sports Illustrated under the heading “ROBO QB: The Making of a Perfect Athlete.” Marinovich’s father put a football in his crib and subjected him to conditioning drills even before he knew how to walk.

From a certain perspective, one might argue it worked. Marinovich did make the NFL for a few Sundays.

He also battled addiction for most of his adult life and was arrested more than 10 times on drug charges. And while one might argue that McCartney, Lennon and Gates all turned out to be relatively well-adjusted geniuses, the same can’t be said for Tiger Woods, who, obviously, never learned what it was to be married.

Nevertheless, the 10,000-hour rule has started to creep into youth athletics in the United States. There is an irony here.

For most of the 20th century, the dominant political and philosophical struggle was between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviets, we were told, took kids with aptitude and forced them into becoming hockey players or gymnasts or figure skaters and that was all they were allowed to do. This picture of Soviet athleticism was presented in the muscular caricature of Ivan Drago, the mono-syllabic, steroid-using, punching machine from “Rocky IV.”

Meanwhile, in America, our athletic heroes took up their games by choice and mastered them out of an internal desire to be the best. Drago and the Soviet Union went out of business in 1991 but somehow their training methods have gained ground since.

Those looking to resist need only think of Sundberg and Gallo and Conley. Think of Rico Brogna and his teammates.

Then let your kids go play whatever sports they want.

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