Six kids here. First two didn't specialize because we didn't have the money and didn't know enough about travel soccer. They played other recreations sports. They are the most coordinated and best athletes overall. Next two were heavily into specialized youth sports (soccer). Three torn ACLs between them and they haven't touched a soccer ball much since high school. The last two, we are diversifying with the funds we have. Some specialization but also trying a bunch of sports. So I can anecdotally confirm the above observations.
I will say this, diversification in the US requires time and money. Not as much as specialization, but still a good bit. If you are a large family or don't have the means/time, or availability of multiple sports (we're in a rural area) you pick one and do the best you can. That's just reality.
Frank, awesome comment and thanks for sharing your experience. You hit on an issue that pains me, which is that we increasingly set up barriers (financial and otherwise) to broad participation. I think that's bad for outcomes at every stage, from early participation to eventual elite performance. Really appreciate your personal insight here.
I agree. Physical Education (PE) in schools (both public and private) up until the 1990s provided low barrier athletic diversification. Even in the late 1980s we had to take PE and it involved an introduction in a bunch of sports and included tons of games that developed athletic (and survival skills--dodgeball!) skills for grades 1-12. When schools changed PE making it optional or non-existent and changing the experience away from sports toward "health and wellness", disadvantaged youth lost that low barrier sports diversification opportunity. Couple the fall of PE in schools and the significant decline of casual, neighborhood pick-up sports with the rise of the Internet/video games/smartphones and specialized early selection sports teams and you get many of the outcomes you see today in youth athletic development.
Thanks for this note, Jacob. Given how clear it is that keeping the pipeline wide is good for both participation and eventual elite performance, it's a bummer how many barriers we have to more participation just generally.
Like in other sports this is killing the sport of ski racing. There is this weird love affair (pushed down from the NGBs to the clubs, in so many sports) with finding the next prodigy vs just allowing and encouraging talent to develop at its own pace. Nothing new, but it is odd that it persists despite the many studies that show the damage of early specialization. Thank you for continuing to beat the drum in Range and Range Widely. It's great stuff!
Edie: "this weird love affair with finding the next prodigy" ...THIS! It's such a strong pull — and magnified in movies and news stories — and I totally get it. But also, we should at least pay some attention to the research. In any case, sometimes I'm self-conscious about beating the drum, so I really appreciate the encouragement.
As an athletic trainer treating college athlete injuries for 10+ years and a dad of 3 young boys this topic drives me nuts. More parents and coaches need to be aware of this research but awareness isn't enough. The youth sports environment is set up to immediately reward the parent AND the kid who specialize early. I just had a conversation this morning with my 8 year old son about how his friend at school was telling him he's in a lower flag football league and isn't as good since he's only played one session and his friend has played 3. It made my son feel bad and contributes to this false idea that he should just play football and nothing else. By the way, they play in the exact same league but I only let him play one session per year so he can do other sports and activities but it's hard to sell him on this sometimes due to what his friends are doing and saying. The peer pressure is real! Thanks for spreading the word David!
Stuart, I don't have anything to add, just want to thank you for this comment, and your work, as a parent and athletic trainer. So much of the infrastructure is now set up to make it hard for parents and kids to opt out of it even if they really want to, so I fear it will become a self-enforcing system. (Btw: I made sure to use "athletic trainer" not just "trainer";)
Moving kids earlier into TPP is so common in soccer. As a Dad and soccer fan, I wish more people would listen to this advice. People wonder why "the best" young athletes always seem to be injured while at the same time calling for earlier identification and specialization. Players that succeed without the TPP are explained away as anomalies. "Imagine how good they could have been with earlier identification and coaching!" Thanks for highlighting this, David.
Joe, well said and you hit a key issue here. I don't think anyone thinks that there aren't also early specializers who succeed, but we rarely recognize that those are the actual anomalies, not the "side entry" athletes. We have our stories damagingly backward!
Thanks for the reply. I loved your books, use the concepts, and mention them to others often. Lebron is truly great and was from young age. But we shouldn't build our systems around his life as if it is a model for greatness.
I read Range a few years ago and loved it. But now that I have three kids, a lot of it seems good in theory but less realistic in practice. I currently have a 3, 10, and 12 year old. The younger is in swim and ballet, the middle is in piano and soccer, and the oldest is in theater and soccer - none of it highly competitive. Our family hardly has time to sit down and breathe. I just finished reading The Anxious Generation, and I think about the lack of free play in all these households promoting multiple extracurriculars. And again, these are only recreational level activities - soccer practices only twice a week, piano and ballet once a week, and swim twice a week. This is also not counting homework or catch up math because one of our kids is slightly behind.
I'm not complaining, but I'm also not seeing a clear path forward. I know the path will be different for each family and even each child, but it seems like there are times to specialize, times to diversify, or maybe times to not do extracurriculars? I don't know.
At risk of being overly verbose, I also wonder if we looked at the best 50% of college basketball players, would most of them diversified or specialized or a combination of both? I know it can be easy to selection bias ourselves in these situations.
Hi Paul, I think it's becoming increasingly impossible in America to follow the best developmental principles for child athletes (and, per the Anxious Generation, perhaps for children generally). I think this will become even more true with the rush to develop early for NIL money. I don't have an answer for that, as there is no realistic way for most parents to just operate outside of the systems that exist where they live. I hope I provided some coherent ammo for those who might be interested in change, but I don't think there's anything like an "opt out" button for parents, at least in sports. In terms of selection bias, these review studies are consistent with a smaller number of studies that actually match for skill a level at a certain age and then track activities and development, so I don't think we're looking only at cross-sectional data. As far as times to specialize, I think everyone specializes to one degree or another at some point, it's a question of the toolbox they accrue en route. I think free play is the best of all worlds: tons of movement diversity, creativity, and real-time problem solving. I don't think it's a mystery why the greatest soccer players almost uniformly grew up playing futsal, which is played on whatever surface and space they can find at a given moment. I've seen programs in other sports, like Judy Murray's tennis camp (her sons are Andie and Jamie Murray), where a ton of problem solving and movement diversity is deliberately incorporated within tennis activities. So I think that's a potential path forward. More than that, when I think about my own kid, I'm a lot more interested in helping him develop breadth in his thinking tools and perspective than in sports — and I think I can do more in that regard anyway — but that's just my own take.
...I want to add to this that I don't think anything you read in my book or anyone else's is as important as just some basic stuff that is pretty intuitive, like helping kids (or people in general) find things they're interested in, and learn a bit about who they are, no matter how they get there. (And I'm big on encouraging some smart risk taking.) That may be trite and obvious, but I think (and I'm partly speaking to myself here), it's worth pointing out that some of that basic stuff probably accounts for more variance in any important outcome than the points writers or scientists or whoever are often making. Not to say other stuff isn't important, but, as an analogy, sometimes I read about running performance, and people get caught up in this versus that model of shoe, while losing sight of finding a coach or plan that keeps you healthy and interested in consistent training, which is far more impactful. Overall, I think all of the books in this self-improvement genre should be taken as information to go into a decision-making stew, and not as prescriptions to feel bad when we can't perfectly follow them. I know I'm being super obvious here, so please take this as me talking mostly to myself;)
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I take time to comment on your Stack because I know how deliberate you are about responding. Yes, I agree. Interest in said activity trumps everything. Sometimes this interest is why a child is doing an activity in the first place, but I think interest can be cultivated by an appropriately directive parent. If a child realizes they have talent in something, or they develop a level of expertise, interest/passion often follows.
And just to make clear, I hadn't trying to take a dump on your book. I still agree with much of what it says and strive to incorporate that into my parenting. I was more just complaining about my life/the modern life, as ridiculous as that it. And now that I'm partially down this rabbit hole, I actually am super happy with my life on the whole and generally day to day; I'm just someone who wants it to be the best it can be, for myself, my wife, and my children - and everyone else. But I guess that's why we are all here anyways.
Ha, I didn't take it that away at all! (But critiques are also always welcome.) Mostly, I'm glad to hear you're doing so well, but also still striving.
Agreeing with the above argument, what is the ideal age to start specialization if you want to be a college or professional athlete? 16 or 17 maybe? Or maybe it's just case dependent for everyone.
Wayne Gretzky is an interesting case. Although he was a hockey prodigy, he also played a variety of other sports as a teen, including baseball, running, and lacrosse (which he credits with teaching him to avoid getting checked)
David, unrelated things are always (even especially!) welcome here. I'm looking forward to checking this out. I know a bit about Einstein's history at the patent office, and it has always made me wonder whether some of the most seminal breakthroughs require a mix of access to the common knowledge of a field but some measure of outsider view as well. Like Darwin, with his many scientific pen pals keeping him up to date, but also off voyaging on his own. In any case, thanks for this, and I'll eagerly devour it as soon as finish a bit of work travel.
Maybe one day people will finally start to take this advice! Thinking about my own childhood, I feel lucky that my parents did this with sports to some extent. I'm not sure how deliberate it was on their part, but I think they were all for it since I really enjoyed everything I played. I ended up playing baseball through college, but I played every other sport until 8th grade. My middle/high school's baseball program was very intense and my coaches *strongly* encouraged us to play only baseball from that age on. (For example, I was a goalie on the soccer team at the time, and one baseball coach started calling me Hope Solo at practice.) I wish I'd been able to play other sports through high school, but I also recognize being able to play through 7th grade seems better than what a lot of kids are forced to do today. Did your parents have a Brent Clark approach with you?
A coaching calling you "Hope Solo" is bringing me back to days of coaches I had who I thought were pretty cool or funny but who I think would be run out of town today. (Some of them, but not all, with good reason.) As for my parents, I was definitely the one driving the sports bus. They really were not sports people so much. I mean, they'd keep up with the Chicago teams casually, and watch big games, and my dad grew up playing baseball and as a White Sox fan, but the sport I remember them being most interested in (and "most" was not that much) was tennis, which I was not interested in. I was a latchkey kid, and I was the one wanting to do all sports, and a lot of that was also just sandlot style, not formal leagues. My first love was baseball, but it would rotate, and in high school I played some football, basketball, and baseball, but I wasn't growing (and had an injury that hugely impacted my throwing) and really wanted to do college sports. I got into running basically to stay in shape for other sports, and fell in love with it. My parents did make me take piano lessons for a little while, which I largely shirked...totally stupid on my part!! Right now (or when I'm done with my book) I'd pay a significant amount to learn piano and Spanish and those are things that were offered to me and I sort of didn't pay attention. But people are ready for things at different times;) ...This is random, but you reminded me of it: when I got to college, one of my first semester classes was a required masterpieces of western literature. It started with Virgil's Aeneid. I was struggling! Many of my classmates had gone to private schools that really prepared them — and by really prepared I mean had them read the stuff they were going to read in college. So I had a tough time freshman year, but I also feel like I got a lot more out of it than many of them. A lot of the students seemed like they'd gotten the Cliffs Notes version of everything, and were kind of over it. I remember a classmate explaining, like, "Achilles is doing X because Patroclus is actually his lover and ...." etc. And I'm thinking: "Wait what?? Where does it say that??" I had to learn to read. I think that class lit a spark for writing that remained even as I did other things for a while. I actually think coming into that class less well prepared meant that I didn't get as good a grade the first semester (it was a full year course), but the thinking was so fresh to me, almost radical even though these are old ideas, that it changed my life. Years later, I got to do a duo Q&A with the professor: https://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/issue/spring20/article/%E2%80%9Crange%E2%80%9D-and-higher-education
Haha I totally resonate with piano. I took lessons as a kid too, and I'm kicking myself for being so apathetic about it at the time. I can't remember if I read this in Range or something else someone else wrote, but it was the idea that a study found the first music teachers or high-achieving musicians, and they realized the teachers weren't exceptional in any way except that they got their students to enjoy the lessons. I read a book about different education systems, and I think it's Finland's pre-K that has no formal education, only play. Then in Kindergarten, their main priority is not learning to read or even student learning more broadly. Rather their main focus is the idea that students learn that learning is fun. I think of that constantly with my 7th graders. As a third year teacher, I just haven't figured out how to bring joy and rigor together yet. But rest assured I'll keep trying. (Sorry, a bit of a tangent.)
Anyway, your experience in that first year class honestly sounds like an anecdote right out of Range, specifically the "Learning, Fast and Slow" chapter. You cited a study there right that found that at a military school, students who got worse grades in their first year (and had harder teachers) did better the next year, right? It has me trying to think how I can encourage myself to do things like that now... reading War & Peace might be an example!
I finished The Anxious Generation, by the way. Very thought-provoking, and I'm sure you had even more thoughts having grown up as a latchkey kid. Thanks again for sharing that Q&A with your prof. The way she speaks about it, it sounds like specialization could be thought of as a collective trap just like early cell phone and social media adoption are, right? Maybe you've already written that somewhere, but I can't help but notice that no one ever seems to argue in favor of, say, AAU basketball.
Also, ditto for my coaches. They felt like role models or even parents at certain times, so I think I'll need more distance before I can sort out my feelings.
There is indeed some overlap. And part of it is looking at different things. So, for instance, one of the meta-analyses looked more specifically at the range of activities athletes were doing early on, as opposed to anything about TPPs. So there was some overlap, but it depended on what individual studies collected, and what the meta-analysis was looking for.
This makes me wonder: is there an ideal type of athlete who benefits the most from early specialization? I know your book “Range” talks to kind and unkind learning environments, but that doesn’t really address the persona. Maybe another way to ask this question is this: if I have an exceptional young athlete on my hands, how do I know if this type of person might have better odds of adult success through specialization?
For the record, I’m a full believer in all the points you make in this article and in “Range”. In fact, I learn new sports and physical skills easily and master them quickly because I played just about every sport possible and never specialized (my own choice).
Hey David, this really gets at the heart of Range! I know that this is a topic close to your heart.. I'm surprised that this literature continues to be ignored by many. People are always looking for a competitive advantage, including (even especially) where team sports are concerned so it would seem logical to me that TPP's would take account of the best and latest research on talent development which continuously and consistently points to sampling many different sports and hobbies in childhood and through early development as being beneficial.. As outlined so well in Range.. and not just sports obviously! As you say.. you wrote a book on that and characters as diverse as Van Gogh and Frances Hesselbein helped illustrate the point.. I wonder have you been approached by many major sporting organisations regarding consultancy advice on talent programs/youth development advice?
Felix, absolutely. There is no doubt that there are early specializers who succeed, I think the trouble is that we view them as the norm, instead of the exception, which they are, so we get our development planning backward. ...I'm just saying back what you already said, so: I agree!
"[...] athletes with a more diverse athletic background seem to have an “efficiency” advantage when it comes to getting more improvement for a given amount of practice."
I wonder, are there any studies looking into this kind of effect in non-sports work worlds? Do generalists grow faster in any given field than specialists do?
Do you remember what in this was said in Range? It’s been a while since I read it and I borrowed it from the library. What I remember is that Range talked about how taking more time to settle down on a career makes it more likely that people land in a career path that they love, and the engagement leads to better growth. But that’s a little different than what I’m asking.
For me, the analogical thinking chapter is very much in line with this, and mentions the finding in psychology that "breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer." So, I guess the analogies chapter is a good analogy here;)
Ah, thanks, David. Like that Connectome concept where the more hooks your brain has to grasp things, the more things you will end up grasping. I’ll take a look back through.
Six kids here. First two didn't specialize because we didn't have the money and didn't know enough about travel soccer. They played other recreations sports. They are the most coordinated and best athletes overall. Next two were heavily into specialized youth sports (soccer). Three torn ACLs between them and they haven't touched a soccer ball much since high school. The last two, we are diversifying with the funds we have. Some specialization but also trying a bunch of sports. So I can anecdotally confirm the above observations.
I will say this, diversification in the US requires time and money. Not as much as specialization, but still a good bit. If you are a large family or don't have the means/time, or availability of multiple sports (we're in a rural area) you pick one and do the best you can. That's just reality.
Frank, awesome comment and thanks for sharing your experience. You hit on an issue that pains me, which is that we increasingly set up barriers (financial and otherwise) to broad participation. I think that's bad for outcomes at every stage, from early participation to eventual elite performance. Really appreciate your personal insight here.
I agree. Physical Education (PE) in schools (both public and private) up until the 1990s provided low barrier athletic diversification. Even in the late 1980s we had to take PE and it involved an introduction in a bunch of sports and included tons of games that developed athletic (and survival skills--dodgeball!) skills for grades 1-12. When schools changed PE making it optional or non-existent and changing the experience away from sports toward "health and wellness", disadvantaged youth lost that low barrier sports diversification opportunity. Couple the fall of PE in schools and the significant decline of casual, neighborhood pick-up sports with the rise of the Internet/video games/smartphones and specialized early selection sports teams and you get many of the outcomes you see today in youth athletic development.
As you noted in Range, it’s the Federer method…it’s a shame the U.S. youth sports system actively discourages generalization early on.
Thanks for this note, Jacob. Given how clear it is that keeping the pipeline wide is good for both participation and eventual elite performance, it's a bummer how many barriers we have to more participation just generally.
Like in other sports this is killing the sport of ski racing. There is this weird love affair (pushed down from the NGBs to the clubs, in so many sports) with finding the next prodigy vs just allowing and encouraging talent to develop at its own pace. Nothing new, but it is odd that it persists despite the many studies that show the damage of early specialization. Thank you for continuing to beat the drum in Range and Range Widely. It's great stuff!
Edie: "this weird love affair with finding the next prodigy" ...THIS! It's such a strong pull — and magnified in movies and news stories — and I totally get it. But also, we should at least pay some attention to the research. In any case, sometimes I'm self-conscious about beating the drum, so I really appreciate the encouragement.
As an athletic trainer treating college athlete injuries for 10+ years and a dad of 3 young boys this topic drives me nuts. More parents and coaches need to be aware of this research but awareness isn't enough. The youth sports environment is set up to immediately reward the parent AND the kid who specialize early. I just had a conversation this morning with my 8 year old son about how his friend at school was telling him he's in a lower flag football league and isn't as good since he's only played one session and his friend has played 3. It made my son feel bad and contributes to this false idea that he should just play football and nothing else. By the way, they play in the exact same league but I only let him play one session per year so he can do other sports and activities but it's hard to sell him on this sometimes due to what his friends are doing and saying. The peer pressure is real! Thanks for spreading the word David!
Stuart, I don't have anything to add, just want to thank you for this comment, and your work, as a parent and athletic trainer. So much of the infrastructure is now set up to make it hard for parents and kids to opt out of it even if they really want to, so I fear it will become a self-enforcing system. (Btw: I made sure to use "athletic trainer" not just "trainer";)
Moving kids earlier into TPP is so common in soccer. As a Dad and soccer fan, I wish more people would listen to this advice. People wonder why "the best" young athletes always seem to be injured while at the same time calling for earlier identification and specialization. Players that succeed without the TPP are explained away as anomalies. "Imagine how good they could have been with earlier identification and coaching!" Thanks for highlighting this, David.
Joe, well said and you hit a key issue here. I don't think anyone thinks that there aren't also early specializers who succeed, but we rarely recognize that those are the actual anomalies, not the "side entry" athletes. We have our stories damagingly backward!
Thanks for the reply. I loved your books, use the concepts, and mention them to others often. Lebron is truly great and was from young age. But we shouldn't build our systems around his life as if it is a model for greatness.
I read Range a few years ago and loved it. But now that I have three kids, a lot of it seems good in theory but less realistic in practice. I currently have a 3, 10, and 12 year old. The younger is in swim and ballet, the middle is in piano and soccer, and the oldest is in theater and soccer - none of it highly competitive. Our family hardly has time to sit down and breathe. I just finished reading The Anxious Generation, and I think about the lack of free play in all these households promoting multiple extracurriculars. And again, these are only recreational level activities - soccer practices only twice a week, piano and ballet once a week, and swim twice a week. This is also not counting homework or catch up math because one of our kids is slightly behind.
I'm not complaining, but I'm also not seeing a clear path forward. I know the path will be different for each family and even each child, but it seems like there are times to specialize, times to diversify, or maybe times to not do extracurriculars? I don't know.
At risk of being overly verbose, I also wonder if we looked at the best 50% of college basketball players, would most of them diversified or specialized or a combination of both? I know it can be easy to selection bias ourselves in these situations.
Hi Paul, I think it's becoming increasingly impossible in America to follow the best developmental principles for child athletes (and, per the Anxious Generation, perhaps for children generally). I think this will become even more true with the rush to develop early for NIL money. I don't have an answer for that, as there is no realistic way for most parents to just operate outside of the systems that exist where they live. I hope I provided some coherent ammo for those who might be interested in change, but I don't think there's anything like an "opt out" button for parents, at least in sports. In terms of selection bias, these review studies are consistent with a smaller number of studies that actually match for skill a level at a certain age and then track activities and development, so I don't think we're looking only at cross-sectional data. As far as times to specialize, I think everyone specializes to one degree or another at some point, it's a question of the toolbox they accrue en route. I think free play is the best of all worlds: tons of movement diversity, creativity, and real-time problem solving. I don't think it's a mystery why the greatest soccer players almost uniformly grew up playing futsal, which is played on whatever surface and space they can find at a given moment. I've seen programs in other sports, like Judy Murray's tennis camp (her sons are Andie and Jamie Murray), where a ton of problem solving and movement diversity is deliberately incorporated within tennis activities. So I think that's a potential path forward. More than that, when I think about my own kid, I'm a lot more interested in helping him develop breadth in his thinking tools and perspective than in sports — and I think I can do more in that regard anyway — but that's just my own take.
...I want to add to this that I don't think anything you read in my book or anyone else's is as important as just some basic stuff that is pretty intuitive, like helping kids (or people in general) find things they're interested in, and learn a bit about who they are, no matter how they get there. (And I'm big on encouraging some smart risk taking.) That may be trite and obvious, but I think (and I'm partly speaking to myself here), it's worth pointing out that some of that basic stuff probably accounts for more variance in any important outcome than the points writers or scientists or whoever are often making. Not to say other stuff isn't important, but, as an analogy, sometimes I read about running performance, and people get caught up in this versus that model of shoe, while losing sight of finding a coach or plan that keeps you healthy and interested in consistent training, which is far more impactful. Overall, I think all of the books in this self-improvement genre should be taken as information to go into a decision-making stew, and not as prescriptions to feel bad when we can't perfectly follow them. I know I'm being super obvious here, so please take this as me talking mostly to myself;)
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I take time to comment on your Stack because I know how deliberate you are about responding. Yes, I agree. Interest in said activity trumps everything. Sometimes this interest is why a child is doing an activity in the first place, but I think interest can be cultivated by an appropriately directive parent. If a child realizes they have talent in something, or they develop a level of expertise, interest/passion often follows.
And just to make clear, I hadn't trying to take a dump on your book. I still agree with much of what it says and strive to incorporate that into my parenting. I was more just complaining about my life/the modern life, as ridiculous as that it. And now that I'm partially down this rabbit hole, I actually am super happy with my life on the whole and generally day to day; I'm just someone who wants it to be the best it can be, for myself, my wife, and my children - and everyone else. But I guess that's why we are all here anyways.
Ha, I didn't take it that away at all! (But critiques are also always welcome.) Mostly, I'm glad to hear you're doing so well, but also still striving.
Agreeing with the above argument, what is the ideal age to start specialization if you want to be a college or professional athlete? 16 or 17 maybe? Or maybe it's just case dependent for everyone.
Wayne Gretzky is an interesting case. Although he was a hockey prodigy, he also played a variety of other sports as a teen, including baseball, running, and lacrosse (which he credits with teaching him to avoid getting checked)
He was an excellent middle-distance runner...man after my own heart;)
David, sorry if this is unrelated, but I learned recently that Einstein's work at the Swiss patent office may have had a big influence on his work in relativity. This reddit post sums it up nicely: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15qz6io/people_say_einstein_was_a_patent_clerk_before_he/
David, unrelated things are always (even especially!) welcome here. I'm looking forward to checking this out. I know a bit about Einstein's history at the patent office, and it has always made me wonder whether some of the most seminal breakthroughs require a mix of access to the common knowledge of a field but some measure of outsider view as well. Like Darwin, with his many scientific pen pals keeping him up to date, but also off voyaging on his own. In any case, thanks for this, and I'll eagerly devour it as soon as finish a bit of work travel.
Maybe one day people will finally start to take this advice! Thinking about my own childhood, I feel lucky that my parents did this with sports to some extent. I'm not sure how deliberate it was on their part, but I think they were all for it since I really enjoyed everything I played. I ended up playing baseball through college, but I played every other sport until 8th grade. My middle/high school's baseball program was very intense and my coaches *strongly* encouraged us to play only baseball from that age on. (For example, I was a goalie on the soccer team at the time, and one baseball coach started calling me Hope Solo at practice.) I wish I'd been able to play other sports through high school, but I also recognize being able to play through 7th grade seems better than what a lot of kids are forced to do today. Did your parents have a Brent Clark approach with you?
A coaching calling you "Hope Solo" is bringing me back to days of coaches I had who I thought were pretty cool or funny but who I think would be run out of town today. (Some of them, but not all, with good reason.) As for my parents, I was definitely the one driving the sports bus. They really were not sports people so much. I mean, they'd keep up with the Chicago teams casually, and watch big games, and my dad grew up playing baseball and as a White Sox fan, but the sport I remember them being most interested in (and "most" was not that much) was tennis, which I was not interested in. I was a latchkey kid, and I was the one wanting to do all sports, and a lot of that was also just sandlot style, not formal leagues. My first love was baseball, but it would rotate, and in high school I played some football, basketball, and baseball, but I wasn't growing (and had an injury that hugely impacted my throwing) and really wanted to do college sports. I got into running basically to stay in shape for other sports, and fell in love with it. My parents did make me take piano lessons for a little while, which I largely shirked...totally stupid on my part!! Right now (or when I'm done with my book) I'd pay a significant amount to learn piano and Spanish and those are things that were offered to me and I sort of didn't pay attention. But people are ready for things at different times;) ...This is random, but you reminded me of it: when I got to college, one of my first semester classes was a required masterpieces of western literature. It started with Virgil's Aeneid. I was struggling! Many of my classmates had gone to private schools that really prepared them — and by really prepared I mean had them read the stuff they were going to read in college. So I had a tough time freshman year, but I also feel like I got a lot more out of it than many of them. A lot of the students seemed like they'd gotten the Cliffs Notes version of everything, and were kind of over it. I remember a classmate explaining, like, "Achilles is doing X because Patroclus is actually his lover and ...." etc. And I'm thinking: "Wait what?? Where does it say that??" I had to learn to read. I think that class lit a spark for writing that remained even as I did other things for a while. I actually think coming into that class less well prepared meant that I didn't get as good a grade the first semester (it was a full year course), but the thinking was so fresh to me, almost radical even though these are old ideas, that it changed my life. Years later, I got to do a duo Q&A with the professor: https://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/issue/spring20/article/%E2%80%9Crange%E2%80%9D-and-higher-education
Haha I totally resonate with piano. I took lessons as a kid too, and I'm kicking myself for being so apathetic about it at the time. I can't remember if I read this in Range or something else someone else wrote, but it was the idea that a study found the first music teachers or high-achieving musicians, and they realized the teachers weren't exceptional in any way except that they got their students to enjoy the lessons. I read a book about different education systems, and I think it's Finland's pre-K that has no formal education, only play. Then in Kindergarten, their main priority is not learning to read or even student learning more broadly. Rather their main focus is the idea that students learn that learning is fun. I think of that constantly with my 7th graders. As a third year teacher, I just haven't figured out how to bring joy and rigor together yet. But rest assured I'll keep trying. (Sorry, a bit of a tangent.)
Anyway, your experience in that first year class honestly sounds like an anecdote right out of Range, specifically the "Learning, Fast and Slow" chapter. You cited a study there right that found that at a military school, students who got worse grades in their first year (and had harder teachers) did better the next year, right? It has me trying to think how I can encourage myself to do things like that now... reading War & Peace might be an example!
I finished The Anxious Generation, by the way. Very thought-provoking, and I'm sure you had even more thoughts having grown up as a latchkey kid. Thanks again for sharing that Q&A with your prof. The way she speaks about it, it sounds like specialization could be thought of as a collective trap just like early cell phone and social media adoption are, right? Maybe you've already written that somewhere, but I can't help but notice that no one ever seems to argue in favor of, say, AAU basketball.
Also, ditto for my coaches. They felt like role models or even parents at certain times, so I think I'll need more distance before I can sort out my feelings.
It being the fourth meta-analysis in the last 2 years, is there any overlap in the studies used?
There is indeed some overlap. And part of it is looking at different things. So, for instance, one of the meta-analyses looked more specifically at the range of activities athletes were doing early on, as opposed to anything about TPPs. So there was some overlap, but it depended on what individual studies collected, and what the meta-analysis was looking for.
This makes me wonder: is there an ideal type of athlete who benefits the most from early specialization? I know your book “Range” talks to kind and unkind learning environments, but that doesn’t really address the persona. Maybe another way to ask this question is this: if I have an exceptional young athlete on my hands, how do I know if this type of person might have better odds of adult success through specialization?
For the record, I’m a full believer in all the points you make in this article and in “Range”. In fact, I learn new sports and physical skills easily and master them quickly because I played just about every sport possible and never specialized (my own choice).
Hey David, this really gets at the heart of Range! I know that this is a topic close to your heart.. I'm surprised that this literature continues to be ignored by many. People are always looking for a competitive advantage, including (even especially) where team sports are concerned so it would seem logical to me that TPP's would take account of the best and latest research on talent development which continuously and consistently points to sampling many different sports and hobbies in childhood and through early development as being beneficial.. As outlined so well in Range.. and not just sports obviously! As you say.. you wrote a book on that and characters as diverse as Van Gogh and Frances Hesselbein helped illustrate the point.. I wonder have you been approached by many major sporting organisations regarding consultancy advice on talent programs/youth development advice?
Thanks,
William
Great post. I definitely agree with the theme.
I think the counter examples would be Lionel Messi and Tiger Woods. They seem to be among the prominent examples for parents who want to specialize.
Felix, absolutely. There is no doubt that there are early specializers who succeed, I think the trouble is that we view them as the norm, instead of the exception, which they are, so we get our development planning backward. ...I'm just saying back what you already said, so: I agree!
"[...] athletes with a more diverse athletic background seem to have an “efficiency” advantage when it comes to getting more improvement for a given amount of practice."
I wonder, are there any studies looking into this kind of effect in non-sports work worlds? Do generalists grow faster in any given field than specialists do?
Thanks for writing, David.
Doesn't "Range" touch on that idea at least a little?
Do you remember what in this was said in Range? It’s been a while since I read it and I borrowed it from the library. What I remember is that Range talked about how taking more time to settle down on a career makes it more likely that people land in a career path that they love, and the engagement leads to better growth. But that’s a little different than what I’m asking.
For me, the analogical thinking chapter is very much in line with this, and mentions the finding in psychology that "breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer." So, I guess the analogies chapter is a good analogy here;)
Ah, thanks, David. Like that Connectome concept where the more hooks your brain has to grasp things, the more things you will end up grasping. I’ll take a look back through.