Why We Want Your Athlete to Play Other Sports Too
CLOSING THE GAP · Issue 03
A strange thing for a baseball and softball academy to say out loud. We mean it anyway.
Here is something you might not expect to hear from the people asking you to train baseball and softball with them. We hope your athlete plays other sports too. Not instead of the diamond. Alongside it. For a lot of twelve and thirteen year olds, the best thing for their hitting this winter is a basketball season, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a year that quietly works against them.
That runs against a loud message in youth sports right now. The message says pick one, go all in early, train it year round, or get left behind. It sounds serious. It sells a lot of memberships. It is also, for most kids, not true.
The Standard
The Standard we hold here is simple. We do what actually develops the athlete, not what fills a calendar. Sometimes that is a focused block of swings and footwork with us. Sometimes that is a season of something else entirely, where your athlete is a guard instead of a shortstop and has to learn the game from the bottom of a new bench. Both build the player. We would rather be honest about that than protect a schedule.
The fear underneath specialization is the fear of falling behind. So let's look at what the people who actually reached the top did on their way there.
Coach's Corner: what the data says about "falling behind"
The athletes who make it the furthest are, overwhelmingly, the ones who played more than one sport growing up.
Look at the NFL. In a recent draft, about 88 percent of all players selected had played multiple sports in high school. In the first round, the part of the draft built from the very best players available, roughly 30 of the 32 picks were multi sport athletes as preps. The single sport specialist is not the rule at the top. The multi sport athlete is.
College tells the same story. In a study of Division I athletes, only about 17 percent had specialized in their sport by age twelve, and close to half were still playing multiple sports at sixteen. In team sports like football, the average athlete did not narrow down to one until around age seventeen. And when researchers surveyed professional athletes directly, more than three quarters said they played multiple sports as kids.
These are not the kids who fell behind. These are the kids who got the furthest.
There is a body side to this too. Athletes who specialize early are more than twice as likely to get hurt, because the same joints take the same stress with no break. In our sport that shows up on the mound. More than half of the Tommy John elbow surgeries now performed are on teenagers. A young arm that throws year round is not getting stronger. It is getting used up.
None of this is an argument against working hard at baseball or softball. It is an argument against the idea that one sport, all year, as early as possible, is the safe bet. For most athletes it is the riskier one.
A character win and a skill win, side by side
The character side. A kid who plays a second sport learns things the diamond can't teach on its own. How to be coached by a different voice. How to be the role player on Tuesday after being the star on Saturday. How to compete when you are not the best one on the floor. That is where ownership and resilience get built, and those travel back to baseball with them.
The skill side. The movement carries over more than people think. The footwork from basketball, the change of direction from soccer, the hand speed from a different swing. A broader athlete has more to draw on, and tends to hit a ceiling later, not sooner. The reps you get somewhere else are not reps stolen from us. They are reps that make ours land deeper.
The order matters to us, the same way it always does. The person first. The player follows.
What this means for how we train you
This is exactly why we built G2G around an eight week cycle instead of a year round grind. Eight weeks is long enough to develop a real skill and short enough to fit around your other seasons. You can give us a focused block, get genuinely better, and still go play your fall sport, run track in the spring, or take the time off a growing body needs. We are built to be the place that sharpens your game, not the place that swallows your year.
So when your athlete tells you they want to go out for the basketball team, or the soccer pitch is calling, our answer is go. We will be here when the season turns back toward the diamond, and your athlete will come back a better one.
What's Next
All programs require an assessment to ensure your athlete is matched with the correct squad. Sign up for our free Assessment and use code NEWUSER.
Our first 8-Week Programs start September 26th: Softball and Baseball Hitting & Fielding and Pitching Development. 32 baseball and 32 softball athlete spots total. That number is not a sales tactic. Four athletes to a coach, or one, is simply how many we can develop the right way at once, the same way we build the person before the player.
Come visit us at our Open House on September 13th, 5-7 pm, to meet our coaches and tour the facility. Pizza and beverages provided!
— Bryan Danek Co-Founder, G2G Academy
Forge Character. Elevate Performance.
