The threat of youth basketball

&gt;&gt; the growing tendency for parents and kids to focus on one sport, year-round, to the exclusion of all others.<p>&gt;&gt; But while the upsides of specialization are unclear, there are few doubts about the downsides.<p>What doubts? Winning. To be the best, and being the best is all that matters these days, you must focus on only one sport. For me it was swimming. To compete at the national level you have to train all year, 20+ hours a week. And to actually win at the national level you have to sub-specialize into particular events, specific stroke&#x2F;distance combinations. Sure, some stars can win at everything, but the majority of swimmers focus. There aren&#x27;t many champion 50m sprinters who can also medal in 400&#x2F;800 IMs, not in the last decade or two.<p>So perhaps the NBA should stop taking only the best basketball players. Perhaps they should look at people who are not literally &#x27;the best&#x27; and look at people who are well-rounded and therefor less likely to be injured in their first pro year. But that doesn&#x27;t win championships. Professional players are essentially actors on a stage for an audience. They are tools for teams, businesses that will be around long after any individual players are injured&#x2F;retired. What turns the most profit (winning) isn&#x27;t necessarily what is best for the human players.

I have a hunch it has to do with the sort of fast twitch athleticism that is required by the NBA combined with the volume that even young people play competitively.<p>There was a study of a soccer club leagues in Europe. They found the higher in competition you go, the slower twitch the players were. Why? Probably because they could simply play more without injury, even though faster twitch should provide an advantage in speed, etc. Instead though, faster twitch athletes can’t handle the work load and become injured.<p>One suggestion would be to measure this, and tailor the training load individually. Many athletes would benefit from less training because that is how they are built.

I recall reading about some archaeologists who studied the bones of early American colonists. Their skeletons all showed signs of extreme, sustained stress. They basically worked themselves to death and died young.

&gt; You get a sophomore that can do a 360-degree dunk whereas 20 years ago you never saw that<p>Well, not true of course. I&#x27;ve been playing basketball my whole life, and I&#x27;ve seen 15 year olds jumping from the free throw line, doing windmills and double pump reverse dunks not only 20 years ago, but 30 years ago. And all of them were white, since I live in Europe.<p>Do we really expect children of today to not become the fragile adults of tomorrow, when children rarely go out and play? when we were young, we were out for the better part of the day, playing, running, jumping, lifting, you name it. And the generation before us were even more physical, doing lots of work outside. And from these generations came out the super athletes that we all know and love today.

The problem is not year-round participation in sports; the problems are specific to the sports themselves. Swimming year-round is very common and the only thing likely to get harmed is the health of your hair. That&#x27;s because swimming is a low impact holistic exercise (at least for the majority, who are swimming at a state level at best); basketball on the other hand is high impact and is going to inherently have more of these problems, particularly without recuperation periods. Even if a swimmer overspecializes and overtrains without break for years, they are unlikely to cripple themselves because the sport simply isn&#x27;t dangerous <i>in that way</i>.

Unclear from the article how to prevent those injuries? I thought modern sports already tries to cover all the bases, so people also do supplementary strength training, for example.<p>Maybe the issue is not specialization, but too much sports in general?