the emphasis on athletic participation and performance

the emphasis on athletic participation and performance The goal of youth participation in sports, electrical motorthe council said, “should be to promote lifelong physical activity, recreation and skills of healthy competition.”

“Unfortunately,” it went on, “too often the goal is skewed toward adult (parent/coach) goals either implicitly or explicitly. As more young athletes are becoming professionals at a younger age, there is more pressure to grab a piece of the ‘professional pie,’ to obtain a college scholarship or to make the Olympic team.”

(If you doubt the role of adults, I suggest you take in a Little League game between teams striving for a championship. But instead of watching the players, watch — and listen to — the parents and coaches screaming at them, and not just words of encouragement.)

But most young athletes and their parents fail to realize that depending on the sport, only a tiny few — 2 to 5 out of 1,000 high school athletes — ever achieve professional status.

Clearly we’ve gone too far when the emphasis on athletic participation and performance becomes all-consuming and causes injuries that can sometimes compromise a child’s future.

The sports surgeon Dr. James R. Andrews said that he now sees four times as many overuse injuries in youth sports as he did just five years ago and that more children today are having to undergo surgery for chronic sports injuries.

Though far more common today, the problem is not new. In 1952, the National Education Association took aim at the “high-pressure elements” and “highly organized competition” in youth sports that gave youngsters “an exaggerated idea of the importance of sports and may even be harmful to them.”

In 1988 in The Archives of Disease in Childhood, two London-based physicians, N. Maffulli and P. Helms, concluded, “Young athletes are not just smaller athletes, and they should not become sacrificial lambs to a coach’s or parent’s ego.”

They cited an analysis of training regimens finding that “at least 60 percent of all injuries sustained were in direct relation to training and could be avoided by appropriate changes in training programs.” They explained that young athletes are more prone to certain injuries, especially stress fractures; tendinitis; a degenerative conditionelectrical motor called osteochondrosis; and damage to the growth plates of bones that can stunt them for life.