Canzano: Swinging a stick at a youth sports myth
Pro athletes, coaches, and GMs agree on one thing.
I have three daughters. A bunch of random items have appeared in our home over the years. If you have children, you will relate.
A violin showed up in our home once.
The oldest daughter, then in the third grade, brought it home from school. She practiced the song “Three Blind Mice” in her bedroom in the evenings. She is a college senior now. The instrument, which we apparently bought, now sits in a case in the corner of her bedroom. And the notes of that song still sit in a corner of my mind.
This week, something new showed up in our house — a lacrosse stick.
Our youngest daughter, Soji, came through the garage door carrying what looked like a small, tight net affixed to the end of a pole. The 8-year-old placed a tennis ball on the kitchen floor, smiled at me, then proceeded to scrape the end of her lacrosse stick across the surface, trying to scoop the ball up. The ball was not cooperative. She chased it out of the room, swatting at it. It looked suspiciously like field hockey.
What is about to happen?
A parent who has lived through a youth lacrosse season informed me: “The first year is painful. It’s basically one girl running down the field and shooting it.”
Soji has trained in a boxing gym and played volleyball and soccer. She has fun with it all. I made the mistake during the recent indoor soccer season of incentivizing her. Decide for yourself if this makes me a monster parent or a master motivator, but I told her on the way to the first game that I’d give her $10 per goal scored.
Last Sunday, as I was in Atlanta covering the run-up to Monday’s College Football Playoff title game, my wife texted to inform me I’d better stop at the ATM on the way home.
“The game isn’t over,” she wrote, “and you’re down $30.”
There will be no financial incentives in my kid’s lacrosse contract. I know very little about the sport. Native Americans invented it. Historians say they used the games not only for leisure but also to settle disputes and train warriors for combat. A French missionary witnessed the sport during a visit in the 1600s and deemed it “lacrosse” which means “stick” in French.
A neighbor who used to live in the home directly behind us had a son who played college lacrosse. I still sometimes find a lost ball tucked under the fence or buried at the base of a bush in our backyard. Once, when I was pruning foliage out there, I heard the neighbor practicing his craft. He appeared to be running around in senseless circles, while repeatedly firing a ball into a net he’d set up.
He missed the target with a toss because a ball suddenly whizzed past my head and rocketed off the back side of our house — “THWACK!!!” I picked it up, noting that it was dense and much heavier than a regulation baseball. l tossed it back over the fence and decided on the spot that getting hit by a lacrosse ball would not be fun.
Why am I telling you this?
Because my daughter reminded me of something very important this week — kids need to try new things. The outdoor soccer season will go on without her. She’s played the sport non-stop — outdoor and indoor and camps — over the last 12 months. At one point, she was playing soccer and volleyball in overlapping seasons with mid-week practices that got her home after 8 p.m. She now wants to give lacrosse a try.
Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Glavine told me in an interview we did years ago that he grew up playing youth hockey, not just baseball. NFL defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh explained to me that he loved playing soccer as a kid. NBA legend Bill Walton reminded me several times that he rode his bicycle, and played beach volleyball, soccer, and whatever else his older brother wanted to do when they were kids.
“What did you see in Justin Herbert when you recruited him?” I asked ex-Oregon coach Mark Helfrich once.
Said Helf: “I offered him a scholarship after seeing him play basketball.”
Hillsboro Hops General Manager K.L. Wombacher told me last season that they studied the Single-A baseball team’s roster. The franchise polled players during the spring and learned that every single player on the minor-league baseball roster was a multi-sport athlete in high school.
Most kids won’t ever play professional sports. The odds are stacked against them. However, studies demonstrate that youth sports participants get better grades, have fewer disciplinary issues in school, and are less likely to be involved in teen pregnancy. Also, they’re more physically active, develop conflict-resolution skills, and learn to be part of a team.
The billion-dollar industry known as “youth sports” spends a lot of time selling parents on the idea of specialization. But everyone I talk with in high-level college and pro sports — athletes, coaches, and general managers — preaches diversification.
All of them.
Without exception.
The message doesn’t ever wobble.
“Playing multiple sports gives their bodies a break and kids need that. There’s also a psychological and social element to it. Sometimes your child is the best player on the team in a sport and maybe it’s good for them to go play a new sport where maybe they’re not the best player. Also, they get to meet new friends who play other sports.”
That’s former NFL defensive back Alex Molden. He and his wife have eight children, including Elijah, who now plays for the Chargers. Also, their son Josiah, a gifted high school football player with a pile of major Division I scholarship offers, decided to play JV basketball this season.
“Josiah just wanted to be on a team with his buddies and have fun,” Alex said.
That sounds perfect.
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John, I couldn’t agree more. The “youth sports industrial complex “ keeps pushing kids and parents to specialize in one thing at an earlier and earlier age. My three kids played multiple sports until high school but then got pushed by coaches and club seasons to pick one thing. My daughter is a freshman this year and chose to play year round club soccer instead of high school basketball. She has started to wonder about her choice during basketball season and I hope she will pick it up again next year. I think all of the benefits of playing multiple sports that your article mentions are all true. I hope we can get back to a point where we remember that the these are games that help teach our kids valuable lessons. Oh, and we have trumpets laying around in our house from 4th grade.
Our son - never overly athletic - came home his Freshman year of HS and announced that he wanted to play a team sport. Oh, what did you have in mind? "Lacrosse".
This was the first year that his HS was to have a varsity lacrosse team, so I supposed his opportunity was better in lacrosse than other, more established sports. When we asked him what drew him to lacrosse, his answer was "You get to hit people with sticks!". He rode the bench for most of the next 4 years, but I still cherish a picture of him in his senior year. The picture is from behind the opponent's goal. You can see our son stepping over a defender who is lying prone on the ground and the ball is billowing the net behind the goalie. The only goal of his career, but it was fantastic!
One thing I would point out to John - the boys and girls games are vastly different. There's a reason boys wear helmets & shoulder pads and the girls don't. And the correct term for the stick pictured is "chick stick".