No one has enough athletes. Across youth sports, participation rates have been on the decline for years, and when kids do pick up a sport, there’s a significant chance they will only play for a few years and then quit before they’re out of elementary school. And this was before COVID-19 disrupted the youth sports landscape—we still can’t put a number on how many kids just never came back after sports and teams and leagues shut down in 2020.
Which is why discussions of multisport participation tend to become so contentious—while generally framed as a methodological debate, the root is, in fact, a scarcity issue. If a kid likes to paint AND likes to write poetry, no one insists they need to choose one or the other or tries to make a case for why performing some combination of the two will lead to a coveted scholarship. Why? No adult or organization is incentivized to do so. Pursuing one activity does not preclude the other, and though artistic talent is appreciated and recognized as a rarity, as an asset, it is not invested with scarcity.
Early specialization versus multisport, on the other hand, is a competition for a pair of dwindling resources: athletes and their time.
But, but, but…we don’t like to talk about an explosive, coordinated, and competitive 10-year-old in the cold-blooded terms of an asset, so those coaches vying for this kid’s limited time will gild their pitch in an altruistic framework—rather than concede they just don’t like sharing, they will insist they’re genuinely looking out for that athlete’s future.
Is there one “right” way to develop that 10-year-old? No—kids are all different, and they respond to different things. All roads lead to Rome is one of the few sports clichés that doesn’t spark contrarian disagreement because most coaches have anecdotal proof that this is so.
My favorite team on the planet is the USWNT—and there is no single or preferred route that the women on the team followed to reach this pinnacle of U.S. soccer. You have the 24/7 soccer junkies like Tobin Heath and Mallory Pugh, who wanted to eat, sleep, and breathe soccer from a very young age. These kids exist. What are you going to be for Halloween? A soccer player. What do you want to be when you grow up? A soccer player. What are you doing this weekend? Playing soccer. Is something bothering you? No, today’s just boring because I don’t have soccer.
Meanwhile, you also have multisport varsity athletes like Becky Sauerbrunn (soccer, volleyball, and basketball) and Sophia Smith (soccer and basketball). Telling a young Mallory Pugh she should swim or play field hockey as a way to get better at soccer would have been as ridiculous as telling a young Becky Sauerbrunn she needed to drop all her other sports if she wanted to fulfill her potential on the pitch.
Though there isn’t a right way to develop that 10-year-old, there is definitely a wrong way—while all roads can lead to Rome, the scarcity of athletes and the number of kids who’ve quit sports by the age of 13 indicate that most don’t get to where they’re going. (And let’s be clear, *Rome* is not the national team or the pros or D1; it’s any goal-based destination: a high school team, a higher-level club team, or just improved performance on a current youth team.)
What’s the wrong way? See that burned-out 14-year-old who’s announced they’ve “retired” from sports and now spends their afternoons on TikTok and SnapChat? Whatever path they took, that was the wrong way.
While navigating this road of dead-ends, detours, and wrong turns, here are the five biggest misconceptions I see when it comes to #Multisport.