Traveling teams could put strain on traditional high school sports

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By Eric Page | Thursday, July 3, 2008 6:38 PM CDT | () comments

New York-based sports psychologist Dr. Jay Granat pretty much summed up the development of the modern athlete with the following statement:

“Years ago,” Granat said, “if you wanted your son to be a baseball player and play second base, you sent him to baseball camp. Now, you don’t send him to a baseball camp, you send him to a camp where they teach kids how to play second base.”

And so it goes.

The question is: Where do we go from here?

More young athletes are participating in organized sports and doing it at an earlier age than ever before, some even going to globetrotting extremes in pursuit of a professional career.

The elite athlete now is built, not so much born, as it was in previous generations. He has a personal trainer and a dietician and receives individual instruction even before he sets foot in a kindergarten classroom. She specializes early, picking a sport or two of concentration and dedicating her time to it year-round.

Modern athletes covet college scholarships, and they and their parents will go to great lengths, investing thousands, to secure one, fueling a multi-million-dollar industry that markets athletes to college coaches with produced videotapes and personal Web sites.

What does all this mean for the future

of the traditional athlete, the kid who plays

Little League and goes to a basketball camp or two in the summer and plays two, three, even four sports once he gets into high school?

That athlete is an endangered species hanging precariously on the edge of extinction.

“Unfortunately,” says Davenport Central boys basketball coach Craig Wurdinger, “kids are starting to pick and choose and starting to specialize more because of the opportunity and the intensity and how specialized it’s becoming.”

Necessary evil?

“We need to try to find a way to keep the seasonal athlete involved,” said Larry Lauer, director of coaching education and development at the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University.

“There have got to be kids out there who like to play other sports who can still start as a varsity basketball player. They shouldn’t have to play AAU, or they shouldn’t have to go to a certain camp. That’s the frustration of a lot of athletes. To me, it seems like a lot of decisions are made for them.”

A lot of them are.

Many coaches contacted for this series conceded that there is a significant uphill climb for an athlete who doesn’t participate in the “optional” offseason activities. And for almost every sanctioned sport in Iowa and Illinois, there are organized activities 10 to 12 months a year.

That has forced athletes to choose, to specialize.

Take a look at the football and boys basketball rosters at Bettendorf High School — two very successful programs in the Quad-Cities. There is and has been almost no overlap in recent years.

“A lot of kids on the football team want to play other sports, too,” said former Bulldogs linebacker Anthony Losasso. “But a lot of them have to be in the weight room, have to be running every day, have to be lifting every day. You only get one day off a week (in the summer).

“Every school is doing that now, though. So, if you want to be good, you have to do it that way. You have to do it in order to win.”

Losasso started high school as a three-sport athlete. He quit baseball after his sophomore year and even gave up wrestling as a senior, a year after placing second in the state at 189 pounds. He’ll play football at Wartburg starting in the fall.

Little school, big problem

Specialization has hit smaller schools harder than it has the likes of Bettendorf, which can maintain success without roster overlap. For instance, if a star athlete at a Class 1A school in Iowa decides to focus just on basketball, it has a much greater impact on the sports she gives up.

Imagine if former Tipton four-sport standout Ashley Miller had chosen to focus solely on track and field and cross country, the sports for which she was awarded a scholarship to Nebraska. The basketball team certainly would have missed her career 16.5 points-per-game average and the softball team her .400-plus batting average.

It’s happening more and more. In fact, while overall participation numbers are way, way up for high school sports overall, the numbers in some sports are down.

“If things continue on the way they are, the numbers are going to be pretty grim,” Pleasant Valley softball coach Lori Osterberg said. “It’s alarming when you look at how the numbers have decreased over the years.”

Osterberg was a multi-sport standout at North Scott in the early 1990s before going to Louisiana-Lafayette on a softball scholarship. She laments the way high school sports have changed.

“I’m not a believer in devoting to one sport year-round, because you can only learn so many fundamentals and skills of the game,” she said. “What girls are lacking now is the competitive edge — how to be a competitor. And you learn that by being a multi-sport athlete.”

Hurting high schools?

One of the biggest changes for high school athletes in the past 10 years has been brought about by the explosion of competitive opportunities in the offseason. The high school season no longer is the highlight of the year. Often it only accounts for 20 to 30 percent of the athlete’s competition.

Modern traveling teams already have put a strain on traditional youth programs such as Little League. Who is to say the same might not happen with high school sports in the future?

Traveling programs already have had an effect on the overall level of play, some high school coaches say. While today’s elite players are significantly better than the elite players of yesteryear, the average players have leveled off, creating even more of a gap between the haves and have-nots, those that play a full offseason and those who choose to take time off, those who specialize and those who do not.

Where does the separation end?

Some elite soccer players and volleyball players already forsake their school seasons to compete with Junior Olympic and Olympic Development Program teams. And in Iowa, a small but increasing number of softball players choose to play ASA instead of with their high school teams in the summer, because, Osterberg said, “They feel like they get more games and more exposure to college coaches.”

And, Osterberg reluctantly added, “It’s true.”

For most sports, though, that choice isn’t there ... yet.

But what happens when it is? What happens when a winter AAU basketball team sprouts up in the Quad-Cities and offers elite players a chance to play a 50-game schedule in front of college coaches all across the country? It’s hard to imagine any of them saying they’d rather stay and play a 30-game schedule against inferior competition.

It’s a no-brainer, and that’s something that could seriously alter the landscape of high school sports.

“In some states, that has kind of happened, where some of the programs go all year long,” said Hank Huddleson, founder of the Martin Bros. AAU program in Waterloo. “It’s in areas where they’ve dropped some of the high school sports due to funding.

“Do I see it in Iowa? I don’t know. Is it going to be in the next five or six years? Probably not. But as more school districts are hurting for funds and they continue to combine, it is in the realm of possibilities.”

Eric Page can be contacted at (563) 383-2277 or epage@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.