No one is quite sure who first coined the phrase “no pain, no gain,” but in youth athletic circles, the conditioning cliché can certainly do more harm than good.
A few years ago, journalist Michael Sokolove was monitoring a local list-serv
among an online community of parents in suburban Maryland. Among the usual
requests for plumber and car mechanic recommendations were a growing number of
inquiries about finding good doctors. These were not for the parents struggling
with middle-aged ailments, but for their teenagers. Sports injuries --many
quite severe -- were dotting their landscape on more frequent basis.
Sokolove’s research found young female athletes suffered torn ACL injuries at a
rate almost eight time their male counterparts playing soccer, volleyball,
basketball and lacrosse.
In his book Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic
in Women’s Sports (published in June 2008 by Simon & Shuster), Sokolove
examines the growing problem of young women suffering debilitating knee
injuries. His book probes not only the cause and effect of the injuries, but
physiological factors and culture of “overuse” that has swamped youth athletic
culture. Endless practices, games, club games, year-round traveling teams and
tournaments have put many young women athletes on a rocky road leading to a
life of chronic pain, and, in worst case scenarios, immobility.
Sokolove, who has also written books about Pete Rose and Darryl Strawberry
during his distinguished career, spoke with New York Family Sports from his
home in Bethesda, Maryland.
What motivated you to tackle the subject of sports injuries among young female
athletes?
I had intended to do a book about the overheated atmosphere of youth sports,
and then I just decided that this injury problem among young female athletes
felt very urgent to me. It seemed to me the biggest threat to Title IX was not
the relatively few old guys who didn’t think that girls should be on the field
-- because I think most people feel there are huge benefits to girls being on
the playing field and having equal opportunity-- no, the threat is the
disproportionate amount of injuries.
In your book it seems the girls talk about surgeries and operations with a kind
of nonchalance, like they were food allergies. How do they reach that point?
I think the psychological term is “normalize.” I think girls see so many
injuries around them and some of them have experienced so many injuries and
played through so much pain that this is the experience of sports for too many
of them. It seems normal, and that is the very thing that I want to attack: the
notion that to be a girl and to be an athlete is to be injured all the time. I
don’t think it has to be that way, and that is one of the big reasons I wrote
the book.
Do you think we are stoking the competitive fires too much within our children?
I don’t have a problem, per se, with the competition. I don’t have a problem
with playing to win. I think that sports are uninteresting when they’re not
played for any stakes. I don’t have a problem with competition and
aggressiveness. I have a problem with the centrality of sports in kids lives
and the extreme focus which leads to two things that are so destructive: one is
early specialization, which makes kids really poor athletes. Most parents have
no idea that their kids at a foundational level are poor athletes. They don’t
run well, they don’t have the right kind of strength and this is more so for
girls. That is an impolitic thing to say, but it’s true. Year-round play is the
other destructive thing…with the notion that there is something at the other
end. That there is some aspirational level, always playing to be on the next
level team or of course for the fantasy of a college scholarship.
How does a parent go about talking their kid into toning it down and not going
all-out when playing sports?
I tell parents to find an athletic trainer or physical therapist who is
knowledgeable and will regard your girl athlete as a girl and knows about
gender-specific injuries and knows about training programs that lessen or
prevent the incidence of these injuries. Educate yourself. Educate your child’s
club coach so that the coach installs preventative programs. That is the easier
part. The hard part is organizing with other parents so that you can im pose
some sanity on athletic schedules. Parents are really afraid to do that because
they have to oppose their own kids, first of all. The notion that to play all
the time improves you is just flat-out wrong. Every athlete knows that 12
months of soccer or basketball doesn’t make a kid a better player than 6 months
does. Basically, parents are going to have to stand up to the whole culture,
and I don’t know how that is going to happen. That is one of the consequences
of serious sports becoming separated from school sports. Schools have rules:
the season begins on this date and ends on this date, and these are how many
practices and games you can have. Now, for most serious young athletes their
primary affiliation is with club sports and that’s a world of no rules and
that’s really destructive. I think that whole thing needs to be looked at.
Who else can help parents change the culture of youth sports?
I think it would be very helpful if prominent coaches of women’s college teams
spoke out and made demands -- because they are on the receiving end of some
really broken kids. I think they need to take the lead because [club sports]
are an industry and there are people with financial interests that are at odds
with the interests of kids, and it is really terrible and is really abuse at a
certain point. Some of the tournaments -- a kid will play five full-length
games in three or four days, and then go and do it again two weeks later --
that’s abuse. We don’t ask that of a professional athlete or a college athlete,
and the reason we don’t is because someone has a financial investment in those
athletes, and they would never do it because they would be endangering their
investments.
In featuring some injured stars in your book—young women with bright athletic
futures suddenly taken away—did you get a feel as to how they as future parents
might deal with their children when they play sports?
That’s a really good question and I don’t know the answer to it. I think
they’ll be a little better equipped. I think that they will recognize the benefits
as well as the drawbacks of their kids playing sports. What we have right now
is a lot of kids who have surpassed the athletic careers of their parents.
Their parents got where they are because they were great students. A generation
ago it wasn’t quite as common to be focused athletically and academically.
Sports was not place where kids always expressed their excellence. So we have
parents who don’t really know that much about the level of sports their kids
have reached, and the parents are really excited about what their kids are
doing --probably a bit overexcited -- and they may actually see it as bigger
than it is. Your basic successful lawyer or investment banker who has a kid
caught up in this and they didn’t reach this level of sports themselves--they
probably need to calm down a little bit and figure out a way to put it in
perspective. If a mother or father have been an athlete themselves at a
relatively high level, I tend to think they are a little bit better at
negotiating the culture and less intimidated when talking to a coach on the
expert level.
Do you think it would help if student athletes were lectured or presented with
someone who suffers from immobility caused by sports injuries?
I don’t want to scare anybody off the athletic field. There is a fear of that
and I’ve certainly got some blowback from people who find this whole subject
and my book impolitic. It is a hard issue because we want our girls to believe
they can be anything and do anything and the athletic field is a great proving
ground for that. It feels like a mixed message to say “BUT, you are more
vulnerable to a few of these injuries and here’s what you have to do about it.”
It is not a conversation people like having.
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Warrior Girls: Protecting our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s
Sport
By Michael Sokolove
Simon & Schuster (June 2008)
For more about Michael Sokolove go to: www.michaelsololove.com
