Death of Three Sport Athlete

[Fishy]

Absolutely not a shot at you or your daughter, but this whole setup is psychotic.

And this is coming from a sports (doing) nut.

It is.

You absolutely have to manage it because it is trying to manage you.

The saving grace is that the nature of swimming tends to weed kids out who aren't strong-willed. The practices are very hard and the kids are in constant competition even with their teammates. The kids who stick with it tend to be the kids who won't mind telling their parents when enough is enough.

 

[Fishy]

You know how doctors predict how tall your kid is going to be? They look at the size of the parents.

Do you have kids because that is absolutely not how they do it.

 

[superjohn]

Do you have kids because that is absolutely not how they do it.

You missed the point. The point is what the doctor is telling you is mostly nonsense, my dad was a doctor. They can keep tabs on if you're growing normally but telling a kid how tall he's going to be is basically an educated guess based off of the parents.

 

[Excalibur]

That is kind of how I look it with our daughter.

She doesn't like sports outside of swimming. She doesn't need to be shoehorned into another structured environment.

But she does need time to be a 15-year old.

15 is one thing. 9-10 is quite another. And that's when the pressure begins.

 

[Fishy]

You missed the point. The point is what the doctor is telling you is mostly nonsense, my dad was a doctor. They can keep tabs on if you're growing normally but telling a kid how tall he's going to be is basically an educated guess based off of the parents.

Perhaps that's what your dad did, but as a parent who has actually seen what they do to determine how tall your kid is going to be, you're not correct.

 

[superjohn]

Perhaps that's what your dad did, but as a parent who has actually seen what they do to determine how tall your kid is going to be, you're not correct.

Lol, okay believe what you want to believe. My dad wasn't a pediatrician so he didn't have to play along with gullible parents like yourself but I'm telling you the truth. Height of the parents is abolutely the best predictor of height, if your pediatrician is telling you differently you should probably get a new one.

 

[Towney007]

7% of high school athletes play college sports. Less than 2% play D1.

So.

Probably advisable you figure something else for your kid to do with their rest of their life. Not that playing at a high level can't happen or that he wouldn't enjoy it. But it's just not likely to happen.

And pro sports shouldn't be on anyone's radar until they show up at your door - and I mean by your door - your actual door.

 

[Chuck]

It is.

You absolutely have to manage it because it is trying to manage you.

The saving grace is that the nature of swimming tends to weed kids out who aren't strong-willed. The practices are very hard and the kids are in constant competition even with their teammates. The kids who stick with it tend to be the kids who won't mind telling their parents when enough is enough.

I, like most Americans, watch swimming every four years during the Olympics. I noticed the recent announcement that Missy Franklin retired at the age of 23. It seems like a sport that takes tremendous ability and sacrifice, but typically spits you out at an early age and with limited financial benefit for most. According to the web (which I always trust), Missy is worth about $3mm. That's awesome for a 23 year old. She also got a free Cal education, which is equally awesome. But I think of her as being one of the best women swimmers ever for her prime.

I've always found it intersecting what sport a top athlete chooses (or is it the sport that chooses the athlete). Women, on the whole, don't make a lot of money in sports, but look at the men's side. Would the best lacrosse player, or a great swimmer that's not Michael Phelps, be able to play a different sport professionally and make more money for a longer period of time? And the luck of some athletes that excel at a sport that happens to be more profitable than others. If Naismith hadn't invented basketball, Lebron James would still be the best at some sport, but would some of the lanky basketball players?

 

[the Q]

7% of high school athletes play college sports. Less than 2% play D1.

So.

Probably advisable you figure something else for your kid to do with their rest of their life. Not that playing at a high level can't happen or that he wouldn't enjoy it. But it's just not likely to happen.

And pro sports shouldn't be on anyone's radar until they show up at your door - and I mean by your door - your actual door.

I agree.

I think sports are the best way for kids to learn life lessons. So in one sense, I think all kids would benefit from playing some kind of sport. Just the lessons on discipline, time management, and dealing with set backs/losses can only help when you reach adulthood.

But that doesn’t mean parents should be mortgaging everyone’s futures on them making it. The money thrown around for all these travel teams is insane

 

[Paesano]

It's plainly obvious to me which kids truly enjoy what they are doing in their majors, or even taking some classes outside them. Our educational system is often organized to make students hate their classes. Even at a younger age, kids can tell the difference. My daughter sees a stark difference between her current school and her previous one.

Sure but they don't just need to take classes in their major. You have situations where kids are taking required classes that they will probably never use in their prospective careers. My son is Psych and Pre-med. He loves his psych classes. He hated general chemistry but that is required for pre-med. There won't be much need for general chem in his career as a doctor (if he ends up there) but he has to do well in it because it is required and his GPA matters. Same for physics. He likes that a bit more. Same for biology but that is more relevant and he likes it. And then you have calculus. I doubt he will ever use that but he actually does like it. So, some classes are required even if they have limited relevance and the kids have to do well in them, even if they don't like those classes. In those cases, you have a limited love for learning the subject matter AND you have the stress of needing to maintain a high GPA which, let's face it, isn't much fun either.

I guess the point is, getting to do something you love, long term, often involves not always loving what you are doing short term.

 

[Paesano]

I don’t disagree, but still, how many kids can do any of these?

It’s a lot less than you think, otherwise they wouldnt be special

You are correct. I was just throwing this out there in case it could help any parents in the same boat. Admissions at top schools is insane and upside down these days and only getting worse.

 

[dennismenace]

There have been some great athletes who excelled in many sports. Gene Conley for one who played MLB and NBA. I wasn't a big Dave Winfield fan when the Yankees had him but he was quite an athlete. Just wished someone that intelligent would have learned to hit to all fields. He kept trying to pull those low and outside pitches. Here is a little article on him as a college athlete.

Drafted by four teams in three sports

 

[intlzncster]

7% of high school athletes play college sports. Less than 2% play D1.
So.
Probably advisable you figure something else for your kid to do with their rest of their life. Not that playing at a high level can't happen or that he wouldn't enjoy it. But it's just not likely to happen.

There's a lot of really good things that come out of a kid playing sports competitively. Not just for the hell of it. Teaches you all kinds of important life lessons, about competitiveness, team work, comradery, sportsmanship (class and empathy), how to lose, how to win, etc.

You don't really learn those lessons just messing around with team sports for the hell of it.

Not to mention all the physical benefits and hopefully lifelong health/fitness habits.

And pro sports shouldn't be on anyone's radar until they show up at your door - and I mean by your door - your actual door.

Perhaps. But with that mindset, no one would be professionals. It's the kids who are so driven that's all they do since they're like 5 years old that have a shot to make it. Those kids with some kind of innate talent are the ones who make it. Their needs to be (a lot more) losers to separate the wheat from the chaff.

 

[Fishy]

Lol, okay believe what you want to believe. My dad wasn't a pediatrician so he didn't have to play along with gullible parents like yourself but I'm telling you the truth. Height of the parents is abolutely the best predictor of height, if your pediatrician is telling you differently you should probably get a new one.

Since you don't have kids and really have no frame of reference or hint of experience, you should be aware that unless you want to start playing with endocrinologists, doctors are not able to sell you growth packs to raise or lower your child's height. It's not an instance where "gullible" comes into play - this is not a used car lot.

They don't actually care how tall your kid will be other than making sure the kid isn't experiencing some sort of issue. And they don't wing it by eyeballing mom and dad.

What they do is take periodic x-rays of the kid's hand and then look at the growth plates. With that, they get the bone age and they're able to tell roughly how much growing a kid has left in them. By doing that, our doctor was able to tell us that our daughter would land at about 5'2". She's now 15, done growing and she is...5'2".

Spoilers - she's shorter than her mom and a foot shorter than her dad.

 

[Fishy]

I, like most Americans, watch swimming every four years during the Olympics. I noticed the recent announcement that Missy Franklin retired at the age of 23. It seems like a sport that takes tremendous ability and sacrifice, but typically spits you out at an early age and with limited financial benefit for most. According to the web (which I always trust), Missy is worth about $3mm. That's awesome for a 23 year old. She also got a free Cal education, which is equally awesome. But I think of her as being one of the best women swimmers ever for her prime.

I've always found it intersecting what sport a top athlete chooses (or is it the sport that chooses the athlete). Women, on the whole, don't make a lot of money in sports, but look at the men's side. Would the best lacrosse player, or a great swimmer that's not Michael Phelps, be able to play a different sport professionally and make more money for a longer period of time? And the luck of some athletes that excel at a sport that happens to be more profitable than others. If Naismith hadn't invented basketball, Lebron James would still be the best at some sport, but would some of the lanky basketball players?

She actually could have made significantly more money, but she opted for college instead of turning pro. Unfortunately, she probably started to decline after that - she got injured, her results suffered, etc.

It can be a really hard sport for girls. Their bodies just change so much and can have a huge effect on their swimming - there are girls on our team that were final heat swimmers a few years ago and now they're going home after the morning session of trials and finals meets. It's hard to watch - they're still working just as hard, but their bodies are not cooperating.

Boys, on the other hand, become monsters as soon as they start growing. At the earlier ages, some of the girls cuts for championship meets are actually faster than boys cuts - once they hit the 15 and over open class, though, the boys are way, way ahead.

 

[husky8273]

Read Just Let the Kids Play: How to Stop Other Adults from Ruining Your Child's Fun and Success in Youth Sports
by
Bob Bigelow,
Tom Moroney
Linda Hall

 

[Dream Jobbed 2.0]

For a second I was like uhhhh I think Jim Thorpe died like a long time ago.

 

[husky429]

FWIW--I encourage my hs basketball players (including my spring aau team kids) to do track. Specifically 100, 200, and the jumping events.

I usually steer them from soccer and XC so we can focus on fall league.

 

[upstater]

As any parent knows who has a kid in these clubs, there are no good solutions if your kid wants to compete at those levels, so people can talk until they are blue in the face but... the parents don't like it, the girls don't necessarily like it, we all just choose to live with it.

Options are limited.

Outside of starting an independent team (like the poster in this thread) that is more balanced and also highly competitive, we're stuck. People in my area try to start clubs like that, but they get frozen out by the local soccer leagues. Such leagues insist that your club field at least 5 teams before you can join their local premier leagues. And if you do that, then at that point you're a club, not a team.

I do have the option of her joining a less pressure premier club affiliated with Bayern Munich, but they sometimes lose to travel teams, and even worse, they go to tournaments and compete in long distance leagues where they get killed. No thanks.

 

[superjohn]

Since you don't have kids and really have no frame of reference or hint of experience, you should be aware that unless you want to start playing with endocrinologists, doctors are not able to sell you growth packs to raise or lower your child's height. It's not an instance where "gullible" comes into play - this is not a used car lot.

They don't actually care how tall your kid will be other than making sure the kid isn't experiencing some sort of issue. And they don't wing it by eyeballing mom and dad.

What they do is take periodic x-rays of the kid's hand and then look at the growth plates. With that, they get the bone age and they're able to tell roughly how much growing a kid has left in them. By doing that, our doctor was able to tell us that our daughter would land at about 5'2". She's now 15, done growing and she is...5'2".

Spoilers - she's shorter than her mom and a foot shorter than her dad.

Lol. I have no frame of reference!!! I promise you I know way more about this than you. My dad read film for 40 years. He transmitted from the house.

You completely missed my point again. Doctors selling growth packs, used cars??? WTF are you talking about?

 

[superjohn]

Since you don't have kids and really have no frame of reference or hint of experience, you should be aware that unless you want to start playing with endocrinologists, doctors are not able to sell you growth packs to raise or lower your child's height. It's not an instance where "gullible" comes into play - this is not a used car lot.

They don't actually care how tall your kid will be other than making sure the kid isn't experiencing some sort of issue. And they don't wing it by eyeballing mom and dad.

What they do is take periodic x-rays of the kid's hand and then look at the growth plates. With that, they get the bone age and they're able to tell roughly how much growing a kid has left in them. By doing that, our doctor was able to tell us that our daughter would land at about 5'2". She's now 15, done growing and she is...5'2".

Spoilers - she's shorter than her mom and a foot shorter than her dad.

Sorry if I was a bit flip with you yesterday but I've been around it for much of my life.

This was talked about in the context of athletes and parents wanting to know the future height of their kid for sports reasons. For annoying sports parents most pediatricians will follow the growth charts and pay you a lot of lip service but basically they give an educated guess based off of the height and background of your parents.


Does your kid have hormone imbalances or genetic conditions? Docs on the whole order way too much imaging, it's a combo of them being alarmists and unfortunately wanting to make big $$, it's only gotten worse. It's a problem with pediatric endocrinologists and across all of healthcare. It usually isn't needed and you should only be exposing your kid to radiation if absolutely necessary. Having recurring bone scans on your kid is a bit worrisome. Unless there were serious problems with her I think your doctor did you guys a disservice.

If she dealt with serious health problems I hope she is doing well today. 5'2 really stinks for guys but 5'2 for women is just fine.

 

[Paesano]

Since you don't have kids and really have no frame of reference or hint of experience, you should be aware that unless you want to start playing with endocrinologists, doctors are not able to sell you growth packs to raise or lower your child's height. It's not an instance where "gullible" comes into play - this is not a used car lot.

They don't actually care how tall your kid will be other than making sure the kid isn't experiencing some sort of issue. And they don't wing it by eyeballing mom and dad.

What they do is take periodic x-rays of the kid's hand and then look at the growth plates. With that, they get the bone age and they're able to tell roughly how much growing a kid has left in them. By doing that, our doctor was able to tell us that our daughter would land at about 5'2". She's now 15, done growing and she is...5'2".

Spoilers - she's shorter than her mom and a foot shorter than her dad.

Swimming is a tough sport for a kid that is 5'2". Did she ever try gymnastics?

 

[HuskyNan]

I would like to add a few comments to this discussion based on my own experience with my youngest son. I will start out by saying something that I KNOW will get a really negative response. If your kid is an exceptional student, but not an exceptional athlete, consider guiding them away from sports entirely. By exceptional student, I mean a kid that will be well within the top half of applicants that get accepted to Ivy and Ivy-level schools. By exceptional athlete I mean a kid that can get recruited to play their top sport at an Ivy or a top academic D3 school like Chicago or Williams.

Here is why. This push to get kids to "specialize" does not apply only to sports. There is a term in current day college admissions called "pointed applicants". It means an applicant that was exceptional and totally "passionate" about something. A recruited athlete is a pointed applicant. A kid that is on the national Science Olympiad or Math Olympiad team is pointed. A nationally ranked ballroom dancer is pointed. You get the point. The top schools are starting to admit that they no longer want well rounded applicants. A kid that is a three sport athlete and is good at all of them but not able to be recruited for any of them is not interesting to colleges. They already have their athletes in the form of their recruited athletes. The schools say that they want well rounded classes, not well rounded applicants. So if your "passion" was sports but you aren't a recruited athlete, you wasted your time from the standpoint of getting into a top school. If your kid wants to play three sports but could be recruited if they "specialized", well, you have a decision to make. Let the kid do what he/she wants or encourage the kid to do what they need to do to get their foot in the door of an elite college. If your kid has no chance at being at least a recruited D3 athlete, but wants to play sports, you have a decision to make. Tell them to dump sports and do something that will get them into a top school or let them do what they want.

This goes for everything a kid does in high school. Gone are the days when schools liked well rounded kids. Now they want well rounded classes full of kids that "specialized" or "focused" in one thing each. Really, what they want is a bunch of kids whose big accomplishments are impressive enough to put into their incoming class profile. Admissions offices are full of virtue signaling narcissists now. The better the school, the worse it is. There are thousands of kids who are the best player on their high school basketball or soccer or baseball or football teams. There are thousands of kids that are team captains. There are thousands of kids that are valedictorians. There are thousands of kids that score at or above a 1550 on their SAT. There are thousands of kids that are student council or class presidents. There are thousands of kids that volunteer hundreds of hours in their communities. Back in the day, a kid that was all of those things was the golden unicorn of applicants. Not many kids are ALL of those things. But, now, they are not interesting. Now you need to have played your instrument at Carnegie Hall or you need to have done published cancer research or you need to have started a million dollar business and so on. If you have done something they can brag about, you can have weaknesses in other areas. Recruited athletes and kids with other "hooks" I haven't even touched on yet can have major weaknesses in other areas.

Advising your children is way more complex than I ever anticipated. The advice you give depends on where they fall academically. It depends on where they fall athletically. It depends on where they fall artistically. It depends on whether or not they can be nationally ranked at SOMETHING. It depends on their level of maturity and self discipline. It depends on their competitiveness. It depends on your family finances. It depends on your family's logistical hurdles. And, oh yeah, it depends on what will make them happy. That last one was what drove a lot of our advice to our kids. Frankly, it is becoming rare and I am not sure it was the right thing to do.

The better colleges don’t want kids with nothing to show than good grades. My oldest son applied to MIT. He had a 4.333 GPA, multiple AP classes, and had been captain of his archery and robotics teams. MIT liked the outside activities but was disappointed he didn’t have much to show for community service. The admissions officer said kids burn out if all they have is academics - they wanted kids who played sports/had activities and were involved in their community. The exact quote was, “We know you’re smart, but how will you add to our community?”.

If the kids want to do sports, let them. Or marching band or drama or whatever, even if they stink at it. They get so much more by being with other people as part of a group working to achieve a common goal than they ever would by getting straight As in school

 

[Fishy]

If she dealt with serious health problems I hope she is doing well today. 5'2 really stinks for guys but 5'2 for women is just fine.

I promise that i never take any offense - no apologies are ever necessary.

The kid is perfectly healthy....she’s just not very tall. (Only reason they bothered to try to figure out how tall she would be...my wife realized when the kid was seven or eight that we never had to buy her bigger shoes. I mean for years she wore the same size sneakers. Turns out, she was just destined to be small.)

Swimming is a tough sport for a kid that is 5'2". Did she ever try gymnastics?

She’s a good gymnast, but loves the pool. It’s not ideal, but she compensates for it. Very strong, very fast hands and her flip turns are textbook - she’s an all-conference swimmer as a freshman and a state-cut candidate in the free and backstroke events.

Her stature really starts to become an issue in the longer races and also in the breastroke. She just doesn’t push enough water in the breastroke events.

 

[Chuck]

What I always take out of these threads... my kids are shockingly average athletically and academically and it makes my life easier!