COMBATING INJURIES & BURNOUT
Most kids quit sports by the time they turn 13
Frank Velasquez spent nine years as strength and conditioning coach for the Pittsburgh Pirates, training some of the city’s most elite athletes. These days, he’s still training athletes — but the majority of them are kids, some are as young as 12 — in the competitive world of youth sports.
“Ready, I’ll tell you when to go,” Velasquez says to Charlotte Carothers, an eighth grader at Fort Couch Middle School in Upper St. Clair, as she moves her feet along a sliding board. “Nice strong core, bring your head up a bit, finish strong.”
Charlotte, 14, is one of several young athletes participating that day in AHN’s sports performance program at
Cool Springs in Bethel Park. About 70% of program participants are kids and teens, said Velasquez, now director of sports performance for AHN. Athletes get an individualized plan for their particular sport and position to help them achieve the strength or flexibility they need to jump higher or reach farther. They also work on all-around conditioning to prevent injuries.
Velasquez wants them not just to excel at their sport — but also to stay in sports. A study published earlier this year in Pediatrics found that 70% of young athletes stop playing an organized sport by age 13, a result of overuse injuries, overtraining and mental burnout.
“We’re seeing early specialization of these athletes and, when it’s one sport, year-round, with that comes an increase in volume and repetitions,” said Valesquez. “That usually leads to burnout or injury or both. Their bodies aren’t strong enough to withstand the pressure.”
Youth sports have increasingly become commercialized into businesses, said Jeanne Doperak, a sports medicine physician with UPMC Sports Medicine. And with billions on the line for both parents and organizers, the sports have become less carefree.
“Organized sports are great. They develop so many positive attributes,” she said. “The downside is that we’ve created an environment that creates an awful lot of stress and in some cases has made it more work and less fun.”
As a child, Doperak was a competitive athlete who went on to play
college soccer. But her own experience with youth sports was nothing like that of her own two children, who are now in high school and college. “When I was growing up, the red team would play the blue team in town and then everyone went to get ice cream,” she said. “Now, those same teams are going to Cleveland for the weekend to play, and parents are spending hundreds of dollars on a hotel.”
Velasquez, who is 52, recalled that when he was in high school, he played on one of three select travel baseball teams in the state of Michigan. Now, he said, there are probably 300 such teams.
Competitive “club” sports are starting earlier and earlier for kids — sometimes even in early elementary school.
“These kids are traveling, they have tryouts, some kids don’t make it at 8, 9 years old,” he said. “The labeling, the cutting just happens too early, and leads to disinterest in the sport. It’s a shame because we’re missing out on a lot of talent at the high school and professional level from kids who got turned off and stopped playing.”
And not only do some kids quit a sport when it becomes too intense early on, other kids don’t want to start playing a sport if they feel they are already behind everyone else. Doperak remembers watching her son play baseball at age 10 or 11, and seeing his team field and execute an impeccable double play. Where would a kid who was just starting out fit on that team, she wondered? Was it possible that 10 years old was too late to start playing baseball?
“The reality is, if you don’t get them involved at an early age and they don’t keep up with the other kids, by the time they get to middle school it’s too late,” she said. “They don’t get to try new things because they missed out on the development phase because it happens too early.”
The kids who do start early, with a passion for their sport, face other challenges.
Doperak frequently sees kids in her clinic with overuse injuries from too much training in a sport. She strongly recommends at least one day of rest per week with no participation in organized sports. She — and the American Academy of Pediatrics — also advise taking at least one month off from the sport per year. And even multisport athletes should limit themselves to one sport per day, she said.
She has treated young athletes with RED-S, or Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, which occurs when athletes do not get enough fuel to satisfy their energy demands. The condition used to be called the female athlete triad, but was renamed to reflect that it can affect both male and female athletes — and be quite serious.
Velasquez said that he sees young athletes doing more repetitions in their sports than college and professional athletes do playing the same sports.
“Our elites know the values of taking time away from their sport and their craft,” he said. “The kids don’t.”
He recommends that athletes play more than one sport, and not all at the same time.
“Less is more,” he said. “They are not going to fall behind if they decide to play basketball and they can’t do the winter baseball training. They’ll be OK: The rest that they get will put them in a better position.”
At AHN, the sports performance program also offers recovery options for athletes, such as compression boots and cryotherapy. Entire sports teams will sometimes come in during their seasons for recovery sessions,said Velasquez.
Including the athletes who are there for physical therapy, the program does about 400 sessions per week, said Velasquez. They are in the process of building a facility in Erie, in addition to the four sports performance locations in the Pittsburgharea.
Leslie Carothers, of Upper St. Clair, had heard good things about the program, and signed up Charlotte and her 12-year-old brother Owen while they had a break from other sports. The two raced around the athletic facility, eager to add weight to their workouts and check off exercises on their individual programs. Both run track and do other sports as well.
“All the way around, it seems like it’s benefitted them so far,” she said. “I don’t think my kids are going to the Olympics — we don’t have any misgivings on that. It’s more for avoiding injury. I know for myself, getting into running later in life, you do a lot of repetitive stuff where you risk injury.”
Doperak wishes that there were more opportunities for athletes to play at a lower level, whether it’s recreational leagues, freshman or intramural teams in high schools and middle schools, or even just lowpressure opportunities to try new sports.
The positive benefits from sports don’t take a lot of fancy uniforms and travel, she said.
“At one point, it was a bunch of kids in someone’s backyard picking teams for kickball,” she said. “Now, there are so many more layers and it’s so much more complicated. But the benefits are the same, whether you are in somebody’s backyard or at the Cal Ripken Baseball Experience in Tennessee.”