More Bad News on Sports Specialization

New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that high school athletes from a smaller school were less likely to specialize in a sport than those attending a large school. The researchers also found that highly specialized athletes were more likely to report a history of overuse knee or hip injuries.

“Sport specialization is a hot topic in sports medicine, yet there is a severe lack of empirical data that exists about the topic, ” says UW-Madison’s David Bell, Ph.D., an assistant professor with the Department of Kinesiology’s Athletic Training Program and the director of the Wisconsin Injury in Sport Laboratory (WISL), in the March 7, 2016 news release. “Physicians are way ahead of the research in this area and, anecdotally, they report that they are seeing more kids in their clinics that have injuries that used to be only found in older athletes.”

According to the news release, a total of 302 high school athletes completed two different surveys, one on sport specialization and the other asking about injury history. Of those who completed the survey, 34.8% were classified as low specialization, 28.8% as moderate and 36.4% as high specialization. The surveys found that athletes from the small school were more likely to be classified in the low specialization group.

Dr. Bell told OTW, “We have been concerned about the increased trend in orthopedic injuries over the past 20 years. One common reason that seems to get blamed repeatedly is sport specialization. However, when you look into the literature there is a significant lack of empirical evidence linking specialization and injury. We can’t really answer basic questions like, ‘What percentage of athletes are specialized?’ If you can’t define the scope of the problem then we are really lacking some basic information about the problem…if there even is one. So we have a series of research studies investigating this topic.”

“I think we found three interesting findings. First about 35% of high school athletes are considered highly specialized and this is significantly higher than we anticipated. Second, we were able to link specialization and having a history of knee or hip injuries. Finally, we were able to show that high school size influences specialization with larger schools having a larger proportion of highly specialized athletes. We theorize this is due to more competition for limited roster spots.”

“Encourage your patients and parents to let their kids try out multiple sports. Ask parents to calculate how many hours per week and months per year their son or daughter is participating in organized sports. General recommendations are that kids should have a break and shouldn’t play their primary sport more than eight months per year. Another recommendation is that participation in organized sports shouldn’t be more hours per week than a child’s age (i.e., a 13 year old shouldn’t play more than 13 hours per week of organized sport…as a general rule of thumb).”