There are many student-athletes that play more than one sport, but doing so would certainly do more harm than good as it heightens your chances of injury.
Advent Health has researched high school athletes becoming injured and they have found out the most common injuries in high school sports are ankle related and neck related injuries. In order to combat this they advise to stretch before playing and to allow your injury to heal properly.
The Sports and Spine Orthopedics have done research on this topic and they have found out that every year high school athletes account for over 2,000,000 injuries and teens aged 15-17 have the highest number of emergency room visits due to sports injuries. Over 60% of these injuries happen during practice.
Injuries such as fractures or sprains only take from six to eight weeks to heal but injuries requiring surgery can take from 6 months to a whole year to make a full recovery. There are many H-F athletes that play sports year-round and have dealt with their fair share of injuries. One of those athletes, sophomore Miles Barber, has been playing soccer all year and has also dealt with many injuries playing their sport.
Barber has had his fair share of injuries since he started playing soccer at the highschool level, stating “I’ve had three since the start of season, one on my toe, one my knee and one in my ,neck”.
Barber also believes that he wouldn’t be as injured if he wasn’t straining the same parts of his body for so long as playing a sport year round only strains certain muscles in your body. “I think yes. If I didn’t play sports I would not have gotten those injuries,” said Barber. “But at the same time I also think no, because I’ve had neck injuries when I hadn’t played any sports.”
The Jackson Orthopedic Institute researched on how sports year round could cause injury and discovered that if a child plays one sport year round that it would cause more injuries. They suggest playing multiple sports over the year instead of one more muscle would be strained instead of the few that would be strained playing one sport. The term for this is called “sports specialization.”
Doctor Kristofer Jones is an orthopedic surgeon at the Ronald Reagen UCLA medical center and the Lakers’ head team physician. Jones says that sports specialization is physically and emotionally detrimental as it can cause an increased risk of burnout,depression and anxiety.
The best way to prevent injury is to drink a plentiful amount of fluids and to take breaks when playing. Most injuries are caused from overuse and over specializing in one sport as it only strains certain parts of the body.
But this isn’t something that we only see with high school athletes as Manchester United legend Wayne Rooney and Ac Milan legend Ricardo Kaka, who have had their soccer careers riddled with injuries. These athletes have been playing their sport every day of their lives before they were drafted into the NBA, with groups such as their highschool team then playing in the Amaeture Athletic Union (AAU) basketball league afterwards when their season is over.
All of this is to achieve their dream of becoming professional, but it does come at a cost. Putting your body through so much hardship could be detrimental for a person especially later in life as it withers down due to age.
