Thursday, July 11, 2019

Ticking

I saw this article over at ESPN today: 'These kids are ticking time bombs': The threat of youth basketball.

The 'ticking time bomb' referred to in the headline is injury. Kids are having serious injuries at much earlier ages than ever before. Here's an excerpt:
"They just march in here and out -- knee pain, ankle pain, head pain, back pain," says Dr. Chris Powers, a USC professor and the director of its biokinesiology program. "We see kids all the time that are 10, 11 years old with really bad tendinitis and overuse injuries all the time. I've seen ACL tears in 11-year-olds."

The cause, according to the article, is specialization. Specializing in one sport at an early age predisposes a kid to develop imbalances that result in more frequent and serious injuries than kids who don't specialize.

Of course, what the article doesn't say is that unless you're an athlete in the 99.99% category, you have to specialize. If you want to play in college, you have to spend an incredible amount of time getting seen, and getting seen means playing games. Lots of games.

Plus, you need connections. Lots and lots of connections. Sports is so inbred. Coach A is buddies with Coach B in another state who coaches at the next level and might give you a shot because Coach A vouches for you, and if coaches C and D vouch for you, it's even better. It's six degrees of separation. 

In basketball, kids who play both high school and AAU can easily play 100 games a year. In hockey, kids will play 65 games a year in AAA, then play spring hockey (10-20 games), and a few summer tournaments (8-15 games).

That adds up, on the high end, to 100 games a year. Of hockey!

Baseball is the same way. So is soccer.

Travel sports (in this case, AAU) gets the blame in the article, but I don't know why. Sure, travel sports exploit kids, but so does the NCAA. College coaches at the D-1 level have kids play two to four years of juniors in hockey. They go to junior college for baseball, basketball, and football (usually for two years, so almost the equivalent of juniors).

Why is it like this? Because everybody needs to make their money.

There's absolutely no way that anyone needs to be playing more than 50 games a year in any youth sport for optimal development. But optimal development would mean that a whole bunch of people wouldn't make their money.

The NCAA? Absolutely the same way. It's all about people making their money. Money, money, money.

Eli 17.11 has been, in comparison, very fortunate. We always talked about how important it was to avoid injury. He didn't start playing huge numbers of games until he was 15, and it was only for two seasons. He was in a workout program specifically designed to strengthen his hips and other areas that are are particularly stressed in goal (you wouldn't believe the problems that goalies have with their hips and knees). He had a stretching coach--seriously, he did--that had him on an extensive program designed to protect him from injury.

It worked. He doesn't have any options at the D-1 level unless he played juniors for 2+ years, which he's not going to do because he knows it's bullshit, but his body is remarkably healthy for having played at such a high level.

It's a very exploitative system, and I'm really sorry to say that I don't have any positive ideas for reform because the system is so entrenched. Layers and layers and layers of people who need to make their money, and consider that more important than the welfare of kids.

Sure, it's a little disappointing that Eli didn't make it into a D-1 program, because he worked so hard, but I'm really, really happy that he's still in one piece, and his academic options, unlike his sporting ones, don't involve him waiting until he's 20 or 21 to start college.

Oh, and he starts the University of Michigan with 34 credits, too, thanks to AP tests and the two college Spanish classes he took when he was a senior. To graduate? 120.

It's entirely possible he'll graduate from the Honors College before some of the kids he played with even start college. That is a very messed up system.

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