Trend for athletes to concentrate on 1 sport – Toledo Blade

HIGH SCHOOLS

College coaches differ if specializing is good

For generations, high school athletes followed the seasons. Boys played football or soccer during the fall, basketball or hockey during winter, then track or baseball during the spring.

Increasingly, for both boys and girls, that line of thinking is turning into an endangered species. College coaches are finding more and more high school athletes are giving up seasons to focus on one sport all year long — usually in hopes of scoring a scholarship.

From the college perspective, specialization can be a necessary evil. Many coaches prefer athletes who play more than one sport and worry that playing all year in high school can burn out athletes by the time they arrive on a college campus.

But in some sports, the average recruit has never been better than right now. The ruthless nature of recruiting in many sports offers a clear choice to parents and prospective athletes: specialize or don’t make it.

“I think it gets to a point where playing year-round, it drains them,” University of Toledo volleyball coach Greg Smith said of high school players. “That’s just my philosophy, but at the same time, I do feel like the sport of volleyball has elevated — the level of play has elevated — because they’re getting so many touches on the ball. It’s really a catch-22 in that regard.”

The debate to specialize is especially pertinent in the diamond sports, in which travel teams and showcase tournaments have exploded in popularity during the past 15 years. For a talented high school baseball or softball player, playing more than 100 games in a calendar year isn’t unusual anymore.

Carol Hutchins runs one of the nation’s premier softball programs at the University of Michigan. The 32nd-year coach is certain recruiting has changed, but she is not convinced it’s any better. Hutchins, who has more than 1,400 wins, still prefers — and recruits — softball players who excel at secondary sports.

“I’d rather have a kid who competed all year and wanted to be competitive,” Hutchins said. “Like, ‘Give me a ball, I’ll kick your butt.’ Give me a kid like that, and they’re way better than the kid who goes to the pitching coach, the hitting coach, and the training coach.”

Hutchins isn’t buying much of the travel-team sales pitches sold to parents. She said she hears stories of young players specializing in softball only to peak as a freshmen or sophomores, or even worse, exhaust their interest and quit softball altogether.

As travel baseball and softball expanded, college programs had to work even harder to find talent. When Danny Schmitz became Bowling Green State University’s baseball coach in the fall of 1990, the Falcons’ staff saw four or five tournaments all summer and observed as much talent as they needed to see. They could go to the Connie Mack tournament in Youngstown alone and find all the recruits they would need.

Those days are long gone.

“I’d be lying to you if I said we aren’t out and about all summer long now,” Schmitz said.

Schmitz also likes multisport athletes and further worries about players who play baseball all year. Since he became the coach of the Minnesota Twins’ Single-A club after his playing days, he has been religious about protecting pitchers’ arms.

The year-round grind, he said, can be too much for a high school player.

“You have your good athletes, and not only are they probably your best pitcher, they’re also probably one of your best position players,” Schmitz said. “A lot of times we hear stories of kids throwing 100, 120, even up to 150 pitches, and then if they have a doubleheader, they’re right back out there playing a position. Their arms aren’t getting any rest at all.”

Football is the college sport in which playing a secondary sport still holds the most weight. UT coach Matt Campbell estimated 75-80 percent of his current players participated in another competitive sport during high school.

Additionally, Campbell liked recruiting outside of football when he was an assistant coach. He pointed to two Toledo athletes — current UT starters Cheatham Norrils (St. John’s Jesuit) and Storm Norton (Whitmer) — who won over football coaches through playing basketball.

In other sports, however, high school students who want a Division I scholarship often don’t have a choice. If athletes in individual sports want the scholarship, playing another sport usually serves as a determent.

“Elite players, you really need to pick tennis by 10 years old and center everything around it,” said Ronni Bernstein, the women’s tennis coach at Michigan. “It’s really tough to play other sports and get to the Division I or elite levels.”

Bernstein, a former college tennis player herself, said the competition for tennis scholarships has become incredibly steep. World tennis has improved, so U.S. high schoolers not only have to compete against others in their country, but the entire developed world.

Bernstein’s teams have won the Big Ten six straight times. In finding top players, Bernstein is seeing fewer and fewer who go the traditional route.

“The ones that really excel, they don’t even do the high school tennis anymore,” she said. “We see tons of kids now that are doing online schools for these individual sports, and just playing all day. It’s prevalent.”

Elite gymnasts often specialize even earlier than tennis. In gymnastics, 16-year-old Olympians aren’t unusual; some coaches have identified girls as young as 3 or 4 as being gifted in the sport.

Carey Fagan, Ohio State University’s women’s gymnastics coach, could think of only one gymnast in her 11-year coaching career who played another sport at all. The gymnast  ran track in the eighth grade, then stopped to focus entirely on gymnastics.

The sport’s demands are too much to add anything else, Fagan said. Gymnastics require such specific demands, though, Fagan said parents must be careful before they decide to push a child into the sport full time.

“Even if you really want to be really good, you spend the time, and you have really great coaching,” Fagan said, “if you don’t have some of the mechanics or the right frame, it’s next to impossible to excel.”

In men’s hockey, where only 59 Division I schools field a team, the competition for scholarships has only grown. By the time BGSU hockey coach Chris Bergeron interacts with his recruits, usually late in high school, most already have ditched other sports in favor of hockey.

Playing secondary sports is often too much for players who aspire to a hockey scholarship, Bergeron said.

“If he wants to be a college hockey player, and he still wants to play his baseball or his lacrosse, he needs to use the limited spare time he has to be doing extra with hockey,” Bergeron said. “I don’t think 13 or 14-year-olds are getting left behind necessarily, but potentially as a junior or senior in high school, you could get left behind.”

Campbell, the UT football coach, said more and more athletes are beginning to focus on football all year. 

He worries about players losing competitiveness by eschewing seasonal sports, but also said chasing a scholarship in a chosen sport misunderstands high school athletics.

“I’ll tell you, I don’t think it’s right,” Campbell said. “I think it does our young kids a disservice. I came from a high school where if you were a good athlete, your high school needed you to play basketball and play baseball as well as football. In our communities, I think that’s so important. Today I see that getting lost a little bit.”

Hutchins said specialization has been a great determent to recruiting. She has found that many elite athletes, and especially their parents, aspire to a scholarship above all else — and she doesn’t care for that ideal.

“The year-round training — I just cringe at it,” Hutchins said. “Most importantly, it’s created such a poor culture. It’s all about getting recruited. All these kids who play, they’re all not good enough to play at colleges.”

The reality — even now, with training more advanced and more accessible than ever — is that Division I scholarships still go to only a select few athletes. Full scholarships are even more unlikely.

Specialization is not always the wrong decision, but only in rare cases is it the correct one. Many college coaches warn that families should be ultra cautious before throwing their child into one sport all year long.

“My advice to parents is not to take one opinion and run with it,” said Fagan, the OSU gymnastics coach. “It’s almost like a medical opinion: get more than one so you end up making the best decision.”

Contact Nicholas Piotrowicz at: npiotrowicz@theblade.com, 724-6110, or on Twitter @NickPiotrowicz