When I coached in Ireland, young Irish players believed that basketball greatness was beyond their genes. They said that Irishmen were not athletic. Meanwhile, the Irish Rugby Team crushed its opponents in its preparation for the 2007 World Cup. While basketball and rugby require different skills, each features athletes who are fast, quick, agile, strong and coordinated. If Ireland produces world class rugby talent with these athletic qualities, why do Irish basketball players believe this athleticism is beyond their gene pool?
Few people see the athletic similarities between rugby and basketball because we focus on the sport-specific skills. We miss the similar athletic skills required to play each sport: agility, quickness, footwork, balance, explosiveness, anaerobic conditioning, strength and more.
Because we concentrate on sport-specific skills, more coaches encourage early specialization – when an athlete plays one sport year-round to the exclusion of other sports before puberty. Athletic development is a process, and early specialization attempts to speed the process.
However, is the goal to dominate as a 10-year-old? Early specialization leads to early peaks. Players improve their sport-specific skills more rapidly than those who participate in a wide range of activities. However, those who develop deeper and broader athletic skills have a better foundation. While those who specialize early hit a plateau, the others improve as they dedicate more time to enhancing their sport-specific skill.
If a 10-year-old specializes in basketball, he improves his dribbling, shooting and understanding of the game more rapidly than his peers who play multiple sports, while his peers develop many other athletic skills. If his peers play soccer, they improve their vision, agility, footwork and more; if they play football, they improve acceleration and power. When these athletes specialize in basketball at 15-years-old, they have broader athletic skills and an advantage against the player who specialized early and hits a plateau in his skill development.
“The growth of sports has led to parents a lot of times having their kids specializing at a young age [in order to] get a college scholarship,” Dr. Brenner says. “There is nothing to show that starting this young is going to get them there.”
The truth, however, is that the players who receive the scholarships are the better athletes. The irony of early specialization is that players specialize to “gain a competitive advantage” or “to get ahead,” but the better athlete has the advantage. Before one can be great at any sport, he must be an athlete, and early specialization impedes overall athletic development.
USC Football Coach Pete Carroll says, “I want guys that are so special athletically, so competitive that they can compete in more than one [sport] here at USC. It’s really important that guys are well-rounded and just have this tendency for competitiveness that they have to express somewhere.”
Meanwhile, University of North Carolina Women’s Soccer Coach Anson Dorrance says that he recruits speed because he feels that his staff can teach a fast player to play soccer, but they cannot teach a skilled soccer player to be really fast.
Because we misunderstand the athletic development process and place a higher priority on sport-specific skills like shooting and dribbling, we miss the athletic skills that underlie every sport-specific technique and underestimate the importance of general athletic skills in sports performance. When we see a player catch, shoot and make a jump shot, we notice his shooting technique. However, we miss the athletic skills like deceleration, hand-eye coordination, visual acuity, fine motor control, depth perception, balance, strength, power and coordination. Without these general athletic skills, the player would not exhibit the perfect technique.
Many basketball coaches prefer their players to play basketball year-round rather than playing soccer or volleyball. Coaches feel like the court time that the players miss is far more valuable than the time wasted playing another sport.
When we learn that LeBron James played high school football or Steve Nash played soccer and did not play basketball until around 12-years-old or that 2009 NBA 2nd Round pick Chase Budinger was a high school All-American in volleyball, we figure that these players could play multiple sports because they are great athletes. However, we never credit their late specialization and multi-lateral development as the reason why they are great athletes.
As an example, Texas Tech University Football Coach Mike Leach credits soccer for New England Patriots’ Wide Receiver Wes Welker’s quickness and vision which make him nearly unstoppable as a slot receiver, as Welker played high school soccer and football before choosing football at TTU.
More children choose to specialize in one sport at earlier and earlier ages to improve their competitive opportunities despite the arguments against early specialization:
“In 1985, a study by the Swedish Tennis Association suggested that early specialization is unnecessary for players to achieve high performance levels in tennis. Among other things, this study found that the players who were part of the Swedish tennis ‘miracle’ of the 1980s, including the great Bjorn Borg, were keenly active in a range of sports until the age of 14 and did not begin to specialize until about the age of 16” (Launder).
The more a player develops his general athletic skills, the higher his ceiling in his chosen sport. Early specialization leads to early sport-specific development and immediate performance gains. However, early peaks accompany the early development, and over the course of one’s athletic career, the early specialization has a detrimental effect. In the Swedish study, “what was most significant was that many players who had been superior to the eventual elite while in the 12-14 age group had dropped out-been burned out-of the sport,” (Launder).
Considering that less than 3% of high school basketball players play competitive college basketball, what do children gain through specialization? What do children lose when they specialize early?
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