Single-Sport or Multi-Sport Participation: What's Best for My Child?

Sports for young athletes have changed significantly over the past decade. Kids as young as preschool-age have an opportunity to participate in youth sports leagues. Club and travel sports programs remain popular for older youth.

As your youth athlete explores sports— and may even show interest in specializing in a particular sport— how do you know whether single-sport or multi-sport participation is best for their development?

Children are not the same as adults when it comes to doing the same activities over and over. Discussion around negative consequences and risks associated with single-sport participation and early specialization continues to increase. Experts now recommend that youth athletes participate in multiple sports and delay single-sport specialization.

What Are the Downfalls of Single-Sport Participation?

• Over-use Injuries: Experts have found that specializing in a single sport from an early age can lead to an increased chance of injury, especially over-use injuries. Over-use injuries are due to the body repeating the same motion over and over. The lack of training variation may also cause some muscles to get stronger while leaving others weak during development.
• Boredom: Spending so much time and energy on one sport can lead to boredom. This boredom can cause a disinterest in the individual sport or sport participation altogether.

What Are the Benefits of Multi-Sport Participation?

To increase our understanding and impact of these recent changes on our youth, we must also understand the benefits of participating in multiple sports.

Different Stimulus and Skill Development

• As your child is introduced to different sports, their bodies are exposed to different demands.
• Each sport challenges the body in different ways, including levels of muscle activation, cardiovascular demands and ratios of strength and endurance.
• Different sports require different levels of skills such as hand-eye coordination, agility, speed and reaction time.
• Skills from one sport can carry over into other sports, making your child a well-rounded athlete.

Decreased Risk of Injury

• By participating in different sports, your athlete changes the stresses on their body and allows rest of over-used areas.
• The different muscle activation requirements between sports can also increase muscle strength and endurance to further decrease injury risk.

Avoiding Burnout

• Both the physical and mental challenges of a sport can become taxing on your athlete.
• Varying these demands, as well as encouraging free-play, will help to decrease these stresses in hopes of avoiding over-use injures and mental burnout.

Team Involvement and Coaching Exposure

• As much as success and failure in a sport is important to athletes and their parents in the moment, it is also important to consider the long-term benefits of sport participation for your child’s individual development.
• Being a member of a team and having guidance from coaches provides your athlete opportunities to learn valuable lessons, which go beyond the skills needed to perform well on the field, court or track.
• Teamwork, responsibility, stress management and commitment are important skills that will help them excel in sport as well as other aspects of their life. By being a member of different teams, they are able to increase exposure to these situations and therefore further improve these skills.
• In addition, your child may not have the same level of initial success with each sport. This will help them learn to adapt to challenges, which will inevitably occur throughout life. These situations will provide opportunity for both physical and mental development for your youth athlete.

If you are experiencing persistent pain after a bone and/or muscle injury, talk to your primary care physician. The Sports and Orthopedic Physical Therapy team at Nationwide Children’s Hospital offers services at several locations throughout the Columbus area. Call (614) 722-2200 to schedule an evaluation or request an appointment online.