Sports commission urges kids not to specialise in sports

Prior to becoming arguably the greatest tennis player in history, Roger Federer sampled a huge range of other sports.

"I had a flair for all different kinds of sports and tried skateboarding, basketball, table-tennis, badminton, football, wrestling, skiing, swimming," he said in a 2004 letter to his fans.

In a 2019 TV interview he urged kids to do other sports for fun.

"Go play squash, go ride your bike, go play basketball, go ski whatever it is," Federer said.

"If you only start focusing on just one sport only, I feel like you can get burned out."

The tennis great's words are echoed in an Australian Sports Commission (ASC) position statement.

The report said specialisation for children younger than 12 could result in reduced motivation, burnout, injury and psychological stress.

"What we don't want is kids specialising really early and losing their love for it and not partaking in sport at all in the future," Australian Institute of Sport director Matti Clements said.

"That's the worst thing we could hope for.

"There's got to be the enjoyment, the motivation to do it."

The ASC said there had been a trend towards youth athletes specialising at an early age.

The statement said specialisation had been viewed as a way to increase opportunities for selection, scholarships and progression to elite or professional sport.

"Often, unfortunately, mum and dads [are] getting misinformation around the value of early specialisation," Clements said.

"If you have someone saying you need to specialise early in this sport if you're going to make it … then of course you're going to listen to that."

She highlighted the the proliferation of private academies for certain sports, including soccer.

"I think that the establishment of academies that are a business model academy, they can often present a compelling message to a parent that their child should be in there early," Clements said.

"We all know an individual who was physically quite developed at a young age and therefore was absolutely smashing it out of the out of the park in a particular sport but, by just doing that sport, lost the enthusiasm for doing it."

That "burnout" can be seen in the figures provided the ASC's most recent survey into sport in Australia.

Participation in Australia's most-played sport, soccer, peaks for girls and boys between nine and 11 and then quickly declines.

That teenage dropout trend is evident in all the popular sports played in Australia, netball, cricket, Australian Rules, basketball, tennis and rugby league.

"Athletes who maintain broader sport participation until after age 12 and then specialise are more likely to succeed in their chosen sport," the statement said.

That rang true for Australian fast bowler Kim Garth, who played multiple sports when she was a kid.

"I played football in the winter, cricket in the summer, and then I played a fair bit of Gaelic football as well," the Irish-born cricketer said.

Garth chose Gaelic football over cricket in her final year of school, but cricket won out as she progressed to the Irish national team before transferring her allegiance to Australia in 2022.

"I couldn't speak more highly of trying to play as many sports as you can when you're younger," she said.

Clements said specialisation in and of itself was not necessarily bad, but depended on the individual and their development.

She hoped the position statement would help young athletes, their parents, coaches and organisations make considered choices about when children started to specialise.