Many facets to developing young athletes
Developing the young athlete was the focus of a recent Brock University panel discussion held recently at the St. Catharines Central Library.
Among the topics, presented by experts in their fields were the affect sports has on families at home and at their sporting events, how participating in gymnastics affects the skeletal and sexual maturity of girls, powerlifting, weightlifting and resistance training for young athletes and the role of clubs and associations in sports.
Signing up child and family
When a child signs up for a sport, the family does, too.
Dawn Trussell, an assistant professor of recreation and leisure services at Brock, is a strong believer in that statement.
“What I focus on is what happens in the car to and from games as well as at home and around the dinner table.”
Trussell stays with a sporting family for a weekend to study them and make her observations. She isn’t surprised at some of the results.
“Kids have no sense the parents teach them about sports, parent to child,” she said.
“If the parent is the coach, the kids love knowing the game plan, inside scoop and the post game plan.”
The family dynamic of sports in a young child’s eyes is much different than what older people see. A lot of the time, the young child will only notice what the coach/ parent does and not what the other parent does.
“Kids don’t understand the moms role on the team,” Trussell said, adding, in the role of fundraising and organizing, the mom doesn’t get the credit she deserves.
Trussell once stayed with a family where the father was the announcer at the hockey arena and the mother was the president of the hockey association.
The kids praised their father for being the announcer and talked about him for more than 10 minutes, but when asked about the mom, the kids said she just cut up thousands of 50/ 50 tickets.
The mother, a minor hockey association president, was cutting up tickets for a junior B hockey game that night.
As for the sibling/ athlete relationship, it can bring result in jealousy and lead to one or both athletes quitting.
“I persona l l y f i n d i f t h e younger sibling is more talented than the older sibling, the older sibling will drop out,” Trussell said.
Young women’s skeletal and sexual maturity
Sexual maturity and skeletal maturity don’t go together in female athletes, according to Nota Klentrou, associate dean of the applied health and sciences department at Brock.
“A girl could be mature physically but not sexually,” Kentrou said.
She found no delay in puberty for male gymnasts, but did in females.
“Almost 90 per cent of sports can delay puberty in girls,” she said.
In her studies of spor t s involving constant jumping, she found it increases the female’s bone mass more than a female who isn’t involved in a jumping sport.
“Professional gymnasts don’t feel any pain when performing due to years of resistance that has helped them develop toughness,” she said.
As for nutrition, a lack of nutrition can hurt the growth of a young athlete the same way being inactive can delay sexual and skeletal maturation.
She believes less severe forms of food restrictions in athletes have been associated with problems in the menstrual cycle.
“A lot of protein after a workout is the best,” she said. “The protein will remake the bodies muscle/ fat it lost and give the body proper energy.”
A question that always comes up whenever talking about developing the young athlete is when’s the right time for your child to become physically active?
Klentrou touched briefly on the topic.
“Being inactive is one of the worst things you can do,” she said. “It’s better to start your child in sports at any age so they continue to be healthy. Eighteen hours per week would be enough.”
Weightlifting for young athletes
Resistance and weight training is more beneficial the older a young athlete gets.
“In resistance training, you don’t gain as much muscle mass when they are a child and ( they) work hard,” said Bareket Falk, a paediatric exercise physiologist and assistant professor of kinesiology at Brock.
“So before adolescence, it does improve their muscle but doesn’t show as much as it would post- adolescence.”
Falk says there is no pinpoint on an age where a child can start training.
“Nurses would lie infants who have low muscle mass on their stomach so the infant would raise their head in resistance,” Falk said.
Skyrocketing costs
In many sports, costs of registering teams has become astronomical.
A study by Paul Jurbaba, a sports management student at Brock, found a new soccer league called the Ontario Player Development League ( OPDL), which is the OSA’s ( Ontario Soccer Association) elite youth development league for under13 to under- 18 athletes has a per team fee of $ 9,000.
“The average fee for the OPDL is $ 3,215 and will range from $ 2,400 to $ 5,000. The clubs annual budgets, based on 14 of 18 high- volume clubs, averages $ 1.76 million and range from $ 800,000 to $ 3.9 million,” he said.
“The OPDL estimates registration to be $ 4,500 per player,” he added.
Dawn Trussell, an assistant professor of recreation and leisure
services at Brock