With competition, more is not always better

The summer before the 2015 Razorback baseball season, coach Dave Van Horn asked former Hog and current Boston Red Sox all-star Andrew Benitendi to refrain from playing in the summer leagues that most collegiate baseball players gravitate to.

Recently, it was reported that top pro baseball prospects Casey Martin and Heston Kjerstad were also advised by Van Horn to take it easy this past summer, doing some physical working out but avoiding baseball competition until they were back on campus as Razorbacks.

There have been those who have wondered why Van Horn would want or advise his star players to not sharpen their skills and success through even more competition than they get as undergraduates at the UA. Perhaps he knows more is often less.

Benitendi was a pretty good player from the get go, but his previous year, he had worked so hard for so long, Van Horn was concerned that his coming national player of the year was limiting his success by too much preparation. The result of Van Horn’s move was that Benitendi shot to the top of the baseball world in his next season, receiving awards as the nation’s best collegiate player.

Martin and Kjerstad are supremely talented players and will be perhaps the heart of the offense this spring when the Hogs will hope to replicate their run to the national championship game of a year ago. Being fairly intense and focused players, Van Horn advised them to lay off baseball last summer and they did just that.

Working with young athletes since the 1970s, I have seen a lot of things happen to, with and by kids. Perhaps the biggest mistake made by some parents, coaches and kids is the unrecognized belief that our bodies are not much different than machines. I have been driving a 2013 Dodge Journey for 90,000 miles now, and I do think that it is running better now than it ever has. My body, not so much.

People, however, are not manufactured. We are organic, made of bone and tissue, with essential needs of rest and revitalization.

I was working at an elementary school nearly 30 years ago, and the school was big on their basketball. They actually had a paid coach for their elementary teams and when school started in the fall, the budding cagers began serious practice time five days a week and some weekends from midAugust until their first game in November. The teams usually played well through Christmas, but always faltered about midJanuary, falling to a lackluster finish in the league playoffs in March.

The last year I was there, the teams that they beat early in the season came back to return the favor later in the season when it really mattered. These other teams had players who participated in football, cross country or soccer and so while they were not as sharp as our school in November, they were very sharp in February.

It is my firm belief that no student can engage in a sport daily for months and months with no other diversion, and expect to achieve optimal results at the time needed. In spite of mounting evidence of the folly of such activity, there are more and more adults who really believe that for their kid to be successful, they have to focus on one sport and do it year round.

I read a report in USA Today that studied student athletes who did only one sport and did it all the time. Those athletes had a much higher incidence of stress fractures, growth plate dislocations, and overuse injuries.

There is a lot of pressure for kids to be star athletes, from their coaches but most often from their parents. Though the number of student athletes who come to receive financial assistance to attend college on a sports scholarship is a tiny percentage of the students participating in sports, that is often one of the reasons parents push their offspring to excel in a sport.

Not all parents think that way. I once knew a man from Gravette who brought his son to participate in youth track meets as an elementary athlete. He also had him playing in football and basketball programs but their main goal was success in baseball. I chatted with the dad once and he related how he thought that by playing all those sports, his son would develop a variety of athletic skills and that he would have more fun in the process. That boy became an outstanding high school pitcher and played professionally at least in the minor leagues the last I heard.

Whether it is working a job, or playing a sport, everyone needs time to recover. Machines don’t really need that but people do.

Overtraining is not just a physical condition, but it can be a mental one too. Kids playing injured will come to dread the sport, and kids who overplay or overtrain are ripe to have an injury happen.

Sports can be serious and meaningful, but it has to be fun as well.

Editor’s note: John McGee, an award-winning columnist, sports writer and art teacher at Pea Ridge elementary schools, writes a regular sports column for The Times. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. He can be contacted through The Times at prtnews@nwadg.com.