Everyone seems to agree that the era of specialization in high school athletics is unhealthy, but nothing changes — except to get worse.
Effective Dec. 1, 2015, the Utah High School Activities Association’s executive board, which is composed of one principal from each region, voted to loosen rules that previously limited what prep football coaches could do with their players in the offseason.
You expect the problem to be perpetuated by overzealous coaches, stage parents and misguided teenagers, but who thought it would ever come from high school principals.
The former rules were bad enough — then they made them worse. There are still two, two-week moratoriums for football, as there are for all sports, and helmets and pads are still banned in the spring, but the scope of what football coaches can do in the offseason has been broadened. The old rules prohibited schools from organized team practices and intra-school scrimmages, including 7-on-7, prior to Memorial Day. They allowed only specific position work and skill development “as long as no team offense or team defense is taught or practiced.” Specifically, that meant no more than three individuals participating at any given time, including coaches and players.
Now those rules, which were fairly ridiculous but better than nothing, have been tossed out. Prior to Memorial Day, full team practices are allowed, as are 7-on-7 scrimmages (except against other schools).
All of which only serves to put more pressure on prep football players to participate in football in the spring — rather than another sport — to say nothing of the usual required summer practices. Players are led to believe, explicitly or implicitly, that they must participate in offseason football drills. Recently, a player told me, “If I’m not out there (in the spring), I won’t play next season.” And this was one of the team’s best players.
As a result, instead of participating in baseball, track or soccer, they’re playing football most of the year. And when they’re not playing football, they’re lifting weights for football.
Ryan Bishop, UHSAA assistant director, explained the rule change this way: “The executive committee (principals) were approached by the Utah Football Coaches Association and asked for some concessions on guidelines for working with their athletes out of season. They presented some proposals to align football closer with other sports that are allowed to compete under club, AAU and other competitive means (i.e., spring AAU basketball, fall baseball, indoor track), where high school coaches can coach their athletes outside of moratoriums). The principals felt strongly that they wanted to better align what programs are allowed to do outside of their competition season.”
Great, now we’re letting clubs, many of which are money-making ventures, dictate school policy. Prep coaches will argue that if their athletes aren’t doing drills with their high school coaches in the offseason they might do them with club coaches, but that’s beyond high school control. That doesn’t mean high schools should contribute to the problem or throw in the towel on encouraging multi-sport athletes. The UHSAA officials should control what they can control. They should simply ban all out-of-season organized workouts, period, until two months before the start of their competitive season.
Full disclosure: I have coached high school track and field for 25 years (and football for a few years, as well) so I have a personal interest in seeing kids participate in other sports. I have seen the benefits of participating in other sports. I have seen kids who had previously considered themselves strictly basketball or football players try track as juniors and seniors and discover that it is their best sport, and several of them earned scholarships from the sport. High school is a time to explore talents and to have a broad range of experiences with different disciplines, different teammates, different competitions.
Kids who believe they have a shot at a Division I football or basketball scholarship — a pipe dream for the vast majority of them — think that means they have to participate in the sport year round. The irony is that college coaches — Kyle Whittingham and Matt Wells, among them — say they prefer their recruits to be multi-sport athletes.
There are other advantages as well. It is unhealthy to play the same sport year-round because it means using joints, muscles, tendons and ligaments the same way all the time, which is why the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends multiple sports as a way of avoiding overuse injuries.
Don’t look for the situation to improve. For one thing, high school coaches like to talk about supporting multi-sport athletes, but it is mostly just talk. As Bishop, a former Davis High football coach, says, “Everyone wants it until it affects their sport.”
Doug Robinson's columns run on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Email: drob@deseretnews.com