There is a recent article about youth sports that caught my attention and a second article that was just shared on Facebook by one of my friends. One article discusses the recommended development path for young athletes and the other discusses commercialization of youth athletics. It seems that America is going in the wrong direction when comes to youth sports in general. The two articles got me thinking about the path junior skiing is headed.

The cover article of the Sept 4, 2017 Time magazine is How Kids’ Sports Became a $15 Billion Industry. The article tells a remarkable story of how kids are specializing in particular sports at an ever decreasing age. The article cites families that are spending $20-$30k a year on children who are 8 and 9 years old, and this by families that don’t have that kind of disposable income. Jim Taylor, the sports psychologist who writes regularly for skiracing.com, is quoted as saying “It’s hard not to get sucked in” to the commercial sports complex because we’re parents and want the best for our children. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that is pushing the agenda of early specialization, perhaps to our kid’s detriment.

According to an article from Huffington Post in August 2016 participating in a wide variety of sports is actually best. The article Why Kids Shouldn’t Specialize in One Sport goes on to cite studies and statistics that highlight that professional athletes tend to come from those that didn’t specialize too early. One study they cite is that for a group of 700 minor league baseball players the mean age of specialization was 15 and only 25% of them specialized before age 12.

So here I am wanting the best for my son wondering if there is something more I can do or provide for his ski racing development. Something specialized like a camp at Mt. Hood or intensive winter camps. Fortunately, skiing is a seasonal sport. It’s difficult to ski year round, so a break is usually forced upon the kids and parents alike. That seasonality has diminished in part by the far flung camps that I see kids attending these days. In the early summer they are jetting off to Mt. Hood to ski and come late August or early September people are traveling to New Zealand or Chile to take advantage of the southern hemisphere’s winter. Is that really healthy for our kids? It would appear based upon science that playing baseball, soccer, lacrosse, tennis or any other sport would actually be the better path, particularly for our younger children. When I feel the pressure to enroll him in the next fancy camp, I’ll remember the best summer camp for him at this age is the one where he runs around plays a variety of sports, jumps in a lake and cooks s’mores for dessert.