I can assure you our current model has little to do with development.
“If its was about ‘development’ we wouldn’t be pigeonholing kids into tying their identities to a single, year round sport.
We’d be teaching the concepts of balance, mental agility, general training, & effective sport dosages.
But it’s not about development.
It’s about dollars.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
When has the over prescription of anything ever been a net positive?
From medication to motor oil, effective dosages will always be superior.
On top of it, abundance of anything typically causes problems.
Take a look at food and alcohol. Obvious right?
But what if I told you that drinking too much water and fitness training could kill you, too? It can.
The point of the message isn’t to scare anybody away from sports, medication, motor oil, food, alcohol, water, or fitness, but to explain that all of the above can be valuable when used responsibly and effectively.
But it’s like we throw the concept of balance out the window when it comes to youth sports.
I believe there are 3 main reasons for this:
1. Effort to keep up with the Joneses. Everybody else is doing it!
2. Parent’s (mainly dad’s) trying to live vicariously through their children, often ‘wanting it’ more than their kids want it.
3. Manipulative adults with financial incentives within the youth sports industry baiting and selling, unknowing parent’s with fools gold.
“But, oh, this whole thing is about development!”
No it isn’t. Not at all.
If it were about development, we wouldn’t be forcing kids to play a single sport year-round, carting them all over the country when the resources to develop aren’t expensive and often within a 50-mile radius of their hometowns.
In most places in America there are resources within 10 miles of their homes.
Organizations, training centers, instructors, strength coaches, nutritionists, hell TONS of kids to play and practice skills. It’s all right here.
I’m not saying you can’t go to Florida or Colorado a few times, and hell yeah I want to see the kids enjoy Cooperstown, but this whole notion of “development” is nonsense.
Over-prescription does not equal development.
If it was about development we would be teaching:
– Balance (Be a kid, do different things.)
– Mental Agility (How to handle the ebbs and flows and ups and downs of life.)
– General Training (You know, that whole like, foundation thing.)
– Effective Sport Dosages (What do you think happens when you tie an adolescents identity to a sport?)
I can assure you, our current model has nothing to do with development & everything to do with dollars.
