HARTFORD, Conn. _ Steve Boyle remembers exactly when he realized that young athletes faced too much pressure to specialize in a single sport.
Boyle's daughter had tried out for a local travel soccer team, and the coach was on the phone, explaining that the 9-year-old was his top prospect and would fit perfectly into his schematic system. Then, as Boyle recalls it, he asked how the travel team's schedule would affect his daughter's desire to play lacrosse in the spring. The coach went silent.
"It went from 'No. 1 prospect' to 'no longer interested' simply because of a 9-year-old's interest in another sport," Boyle remembered recently, more than 10 years later. "And I thought, 'I cannot believe how much the world has changed.' "
Soon after that phone call, Boyle started 2-4-1 Sports, an organization that hosts multi-sport camps and clinics and advocates for athletes to sample different sports, instead of sticking to one. (The organization's name comes from the credo that, "Life's 2 short 4 just 1 sport.") Last year, he quit his job in the West Hartford school system _ where he had coached track and field, soccer, basketball and lacrosse and also served as a guidance counselor _ to focus full-time on the cause.
Coaches and administrators across Connecticut have witnessed up close a national trend over the past 10 or 15 years in which kids specialize in a single sport in elementary or middle school, playing year-round for club and travel teams in pursuit of elusive college scholarships, despite the risk of injury, burnout and stalled development.
And although specialization can make sense for self-motivated elite athletes with credible dreams of professional or Olympic careers, experts say the trend has spread too far.
"I think it's sort of in the water in a lot of places," said Steve Smith, a sports psychologist who has studied specialization. "It just feels like there's this pressure culturally for kids to be the best at everything and to really bolt in and know what they want to do really early. We've lost the multi-sport athlete."
