I've been on this kick over the past year of and even taking my kids out of the single sport track. National Association of Athletic Trainers came out this past weekend against sport specialization through high school. This is echoed by several other youth sports organizations (Aspen, Changing the Game, Positive coaching alliance, etc). I've even go as far as asking for research papers on the topic. Research is finding links between acute injury and playing more than one sport for 8 months or more per year. Further, from an outcome standpoint, in one study Univ. of Wisconsin varsity athletes greater than 80% were multisport athletes. In recent NFL drafts over 90% of those drafted were multisport athletes growing up. I'm not trying to evangelize on this topic, but NY Times just ran an article this weekend about this so this may get more traction in the media. Some of us, including myself in the past, coached for clubs that were 10 months commitments and some players didn't even take time off in the summer. What do you think about this? There's also a research study that the latest German WC winning team didn't hyper-specialize in soccer until they were in their late teens/20s. Do we need to play year-round soccer to produce the best soccer players? What about our concerns for healthy kids?
I encourage kids to play different sports, but I think we should also try to provide options for the kids who aren't interested in anything but soccer. I was one of those kids once I got into my teens. I had no interest in doing anything other than soccer except middle school basketball. Our club is fall and spring. I encourage our players' parents to put together indoor teams over the winter if they want to and especially if that's the only way they're going to get any exercise between fall and spring. EDIT: There's also a distinction to be made. We had Miss Basketball in Indiana come from our town a few years ago. She was a 3 sport athlete in high school, but you can bet your house that she was in the gym working on her basketball after soccer training in the fall and after tennis in the spring. I don't want specialization to the exclusion of all other activities, but the reality is that in order to reach your true potential, you've got to work on it year round.
8 months is still plenty of soccer, IMO. The other months can be dedicated to recovery and expanding other athletic abilities—in light of what they can contribute to soccer. Like gymnastics/gymnastics types movements, yoga, weight training. One theory out there is that the movement involved in futsal is different enough that it may count as another sport.
You would be surprised at how sports contribute. Some academies recommend martial arts for very young players (when the chance of injury from contact is slight). It is excellent for developing quick limbs, balance and losing the fear of contact. You might not think tennis has anything to teach. From tennis I developed excellent first step quickness over 360 degrees, positional play, maintaining the initiative, and anticipation of your opponent's moves.
I think it depends on the sport. It's easier to multi-sport and go into NFL because football is easier and depends more on overall athleticism (ie- less on skill). Soccer needs more development hours than football because of the nature of the many varied things to learn. Football is much more singular in development. But I think I'll limit my kid to 7-8 months. And have him play tennis, dance, basketball (all stuff he likes and I think helps with soccer). I also think golf and baseball can help in terms of learning how the angles of the foot affect the ball and learning about ball movement (slice, etc).
I'll refer a recent book, Range by David Epstein that argues against specialization, with the caveat that books' theses can be over applied (Grit, Growth Mindset) or just plain debunked (10,000 hours). Epstein cites, many examples, among which Roger Federer and Andy Roddick—who didn't specialize until late.
@elessar78 Who has "debunked" the 10,000 hours theory? "Debunked" means proved false. I haven't seen any scientific proof against it and I don't expect to either. It arose in regards to musicians and its a pretty good summary of the amount of study concert musicians perform. I would say it holds true for soccer too.
And this is one of the biggest flaws of the 10,000 Hour Rule: It focuses on the amount of time spent practicing, and not the quality of that practice – and not all practice is equally helpful. https://www.6seconds.org/2018/02/09...hat-you-actually-need-to-know-about-practice/
Apologies that these are mainstream media sources but they point to seemingly legit research. May be not "debunked" by strict definition but certainly misleading or inaccurate. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/8/23/20828597/the-10000-hour-rule-debunked https://slate.com/technology/2014/0...usic-iq-drawing-ability-and-other-skills.html recent research has demonstrated that deliberate practice, while undeniably important, is only one piece of the expertise puzzle—and not necessarily the biggest piece. In the first study to convincingly make this point, the cognitive psychologists Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli found that chess players differed greatly in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to reach a given skill level in chess. For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means that one player needed 22 times more deliberate practice than another player to become a master. A recent meta-analysis by Case Western Reserve University psychologist Brooke Macnamara and her colleagues (including the first author of this article for Slate) came to the same conclusion. We searched through more than 9,000 potentially relevant publications and ultimately identified 88 studies that collected measures of activities interpretable as deliberate practice and reported their relationships to corresponding measures of skill. (Analyzing a set of studies can reveal an average correlation between two variables that is statistically more precise than the result of any individual study.) With very few exceptions, deliberate practice correlated positively with skill. In other words, people who reported practicing a lot tended to perform better than those who reported practicing less. But the correlations were far from perfect: Deliberate practice left more of the variation in skill unexplained than it explained. For example, deliberate practice explained 26 percent of the variation for games such as chess, 21 percent for music, and 18 percent for sports. So, deliberate practice did not explain all, nearly all, or even most of the performance variation in these fields. In concrete terms, what this evidence means is that racking up a lot of deliberate practice is no guarantee that you’ll become an expert. Other factors matter.
I don't know where you got that idea. It is about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, i.e., purposeful and systematic practice. It is also just a theory, not a "rule".
@elessar78 No book or article I read said that practice was the only factor. If practice was the only factor, the books on the subject would only have 1 chapter. I think Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell is a pretty good read on the topic if anyone is interested.
I don't think the 10k hours rule says that practice is the only thing that matters. Or that 10k hours of practice is a guarantee of becoming an expert. But rather, most experts have practiced 10k hours. It takes raw talent, plus a support system, plus deliberate practice. And of course it varies widely by the profession.
This is an interesting topic. I think it’s key to define terms like “single-sport athlete” and “hyper-specialization.” I’d estimate that my daughter plays soccer 500 hours a year over the course of 48 weeks. So is she hyper-specialized or a single sport athlete? We also ski upwards of 60 days a year from November to April and probably average six hours on the hill each day, so 360 hours over 6 months. She also plays school basketball, volleyball, and track. I imagine most that hear she plays soccer 4+ times a week almost year round would consider her hyper-specialized, but I don’t see that as accurate. Hyper-active possibly, but not hyper-specialized. I believe that one of the most important factors in youth sports is that activity levels and participation are child driven vs. parent driven. The real problem occurs when participation becomes forced and the “fun” disappears. She plays pretty high level Club soccer throughout the year but also does “Rec” sessions with cousins, school friends, etc. Is the level of play great for development? No. But she has a ton of fun.
I used to ascribe to 10k but not anymore. The research I referenced above pointed out that national team Germans achieved that after ~4600 hours. You need lots of practice/deliberate practice/accidental practice but maybe you don't.
I suspect that the data is flawed. 20 hours per week is 1000 hours per year. So they are saying German internationals only trained for 4 and a half years? (I suspect most pro athletes train for more than 20 hours per week. A lot of amateurs too.)
Even Anders Ericsson wrote a book recently "Peak" where he says 10k hours isn't entirely accurate. Gladwell popularized it But the "10k", according to Ericsson is an arbitrary number. 10k was the average - it could be much less or much more.
How is that supposed to support a statement that German internationals only trained 4 and a half years?
I've been thinking and reading about specialization a lot lately as my son gets older and each activity asks for a greater time commitment. After reading Outliers, Range, etc. I think 10,000 hours is completely misunderstood. As in many parents took away the lesson that it's some kind of rule that their kid can be an expert in something as long as they put in 10,000 hours, almost to the exclusion of any other factors. This has increased early specialization, not just in soccer but in many other sports. There was a thread in the Youth side about 2 ESPN articles that focused on physical limitations they're finding in young NBA players due to, in some people's view, the "miles" they put on their bodies in the AAU circuit starting at a young age (I'm paraphrasing. It was 2 long articles). It sounded a very similar to club soccer. I read Range when it came out and I believe they discuss the German study elessar78 is referencing. It's been a few months, but I recall the point was that these players were sampling a lot of other activities in their youth and only specialized in soccer later on. They were spending time developing complementary and transferable skills, while still playing a fair amount of soccer, which they were able to apply to soccer when they shifted focus in the late teen years. That was also the gist of Federer's story. He played tennis when he was young, but he also played many other sports and didn't focus exclusively on tennis until later on. 10,000 hours may or may not be an accurate number, but when discussing it in the context of specialization I think the debate is around the make up of those hours. In other words, if you have 10,000 to "spend" to become the best soccer player you can be, is it better to spend all 10,000 just on soccer or spend a good chunk of those hours on other sports in your pre-teen years before focusing on soccer? I'm in the latter camp.
@jvgnj Your view of athlete development is too narrow. Think of athlete development as movement training. Over 95% of a soccer match is spent using general athletic skills rather than soccer specific skills. The more advanced the athlete, the more the training is tailored specifically to the individual. I think children of college athletes have an advantage in development because their parents like to start "deliberate practice" of movement training shortly after birth. Most parents, even college grads who didn't take physical education, won't understand the physical side child development. I have seen 6 and 8 year olds that had better movement than many adult athletes.
Yes, I should have been clearer that I was just tying the 10,000 hour point back to the specialization question that kicked off the thread. I believe that a popular misconception of what the studies around deliberate practice shows influences people's decision to have their kid specialize early. Not the only reason, but a significant one.
But you get that it's the mean of two numbers. It's not an absolute threshold. I didn't pick those two numbers randomly. Maybe the German apparatus is that efficient. Again, point is that the original study researchers didn't think Gladwell's characterization was accurate. Further, violinists are not soccer players.
From anecdotal experience most parents still haven't heard of 10k hours. IMO, their primary motivation is so their kid doesn't fall behind. Since you've read Range—they ascribe to the Tiger model. what I see is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Players who are good at "soccer" early stay with it. If players are not "elite" early then they are encouraged to transfer. Late developers get limited exposure to good training. But we rarely find the players who could have been good after they hit their growth spurt. We take the best of the remaining.
Interesting. My kids are 10, 7 and 2 and I've heard plenty of references to the "10,000 rule" from their friends' parents. I don't know how many have read Outliers vs. who's heard about it simply because it's a popular book and an easy sound bite to take away. I agree with your other points 100%. Many parents in my son's club sign their kid up for every additional training simply because other teammates are also doing it and they don't want to fall behind. I worry about the cumulative physical and mental toll this will take on them because burnout isn't something that happens overnight and you may not spot it until it's too late. My son likes to play other sports so we made a conscious decision last year to be choosier about winter/summer training and tournaments and have been upfront with the club about our reasoning.