The Pros And Cons Of A Baseball Diamond

Anyone who has ever stepped onto the basketball court, football field, or baseball diamond has one thing in common, and that is to attain a level of success both as a team and if they are being honest as an individual. I mean who doesn’t want to be the next Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, or Hank Aaron. Everyone has a different perception of what success is and it may not be necessary to reach the professional level to consider one a success. “In the 2016-2017 school year, the number of participants in high school sports reached an all-time high of 7,963,535” (High School Participation). Of the almost eight million high school athletes, the likelihood of playing in college is around 17 % if you take the number of college athletes referenced below

For instance, the article states of the more than 480,000 student-athletes who compete in college less than 2% of the football, basketball, and soccer players will go on to play professionally. Men’s hockey is a little better at 5.6% and baseball is the highest at 9.1% (Estimated Probability). With the odds against the majority of high school athletes playing in college and professionally, parents and athletes may question if there is a way to be more successful and reach the next level. One thought surrounding this, centers around whether specializing in one sport makes an athlete more likely to achieve a higher level of success than an athlete who plays multiple sports in high school. While you would think that specializing in one sport would make an athlete more successful, there are inherent factors and risks in playing only one sport that works just the opposite which could ultimately mean that an athlete specializing in one sport is less successful than a multi-sport

At the very least high school athletes are training year round. By playing a single sport year round, athletes may put themselves at an increased risk for injury. While injuries are an inherent risk of playing sports, and can obviously happen to multi-sport athletes as well, those athletes who do one sport continuously may be at an increased risk of injuries due to overuse. Overuse injuries are those that occur from performing the same motion repeatedly, and athletes who play their selected sport year round are continually doing this. In a study from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, it states that “Athletes who specialized in one sport were twice as likely to report previously sustaining a lower-extremity injury while participating in sports (46%) than athletes who did not specialize (24%). In addition, specialized athletes sustained sixty percent more new lower-extremity injuries during the study than athletes who did not specialize” (USA Today HSS). While injuries are a part of the game and can happen to anyone, parents and athletes alike have to take the risk of overuse injuries from playing one sport very seriously, as it is hard to attain a high level of success if an athlete is plagued with injuries and not on the playing