Youth Soccer, Specialization and Long Term Athlete Development – What Parents Need to Hear

In this interview I ask:

• What exactly is Long Term Athletic Development?  What are we talking about when we reference LTAD?
• What is the connection between LTAD and sport specialization?
• What is your advice for the parents of kids who only want to play soccer?

Toby discusses:

• LTAD and helping the athlete focus on who they want to become.
• Sport Specialization, when it makes sense and why focusing on a broader movement vocabulary makes sense for children.
• Speed and agility camps for kids.

Dr. Toby Brooks,  is an expert in Long Term Athletic Development.  He has worked as a certified athletic trainer and/or strength and conditioning coach with numerous professional, collegiate, and high school athletics programs, including the USA Baseball national teams, the Oakland Raiders, the Florida Firecats AF2 Football franchise, and the Southern Illinois Miners Frontier League Baseball team. He has published multiple articles and studies, and presents regularly at national and international conferences.

TRANSCRIPT:

Skye:
Thanks for joining us again at soccerparenting.com. I'm thrilled today to be here with Toby Brooks. Toby is an Associate Professor at Texas Tech University. He has his PhD from the University of Arizona and he is just about to publish yet another book. Tell us about it, Toby.

Toby:
It's a book I've been working off and on for a couple of years now about long-term athletic development. It's been something that was really, I was pretty passionate about it before I became a father, and I now have a 12-year old and a nine-year old, so I find myself right in the thick of it and it's been a good motivational reminder just to be purposeful in my parenting if nothing else. I mean it certainly has coaching implications, but for me, I'm excited to speak with you and your group today, Skye, because all kids are important, but in my mind there aren't any more important than my own. So it's a good reminder for me to not just let these years just kind of leak away, but to be purposeful about them.

Skye:
I always say that I think that I'm a better coach now than I'm a parent. I just have a different perspective, so it seems like maybe what you're saying as well. What exactly is long-term athletic development? It's something that gets thrown around a lot. We often refer to it as LTAD, but what are we talking about when we're referencing that?

Toby:
Well, long-term athletic development has been around for the better part of a century now. It's not new and honestly, if we look back historically, it was something that just kind of happened a lot of times. Long-term athletic development is really more intended toward helping the athlete build towards who they want to become as opposed to being so focused in the here and now, I don't want to be the best soccer player today, I want to do what I need to do today to become the best soccer player, best athlete that I can become by the time I reach the years of higher levels of competition.

The problem is those higher levels of competition have filtered their way down through into even five and six U are uber competitive in a lot of places. And so people have lost sight of the long term, everything is short term, and if we try to cater everything towards winning every day as opposed to growing and learning every day, then it really changes things. You can think about it in a lot of ways, like standardized testing. If all I ever do is teach to the test, I might get good at taking the test, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to be the best possible student when I graduate.

Skye:
Right, exactly. And so when we're thinking about this for our kids, what age generally does a soccer player peak? I mean is there any research about that?

Toby:
I don't know that there's necessarily research specifically within soccer. Most of the literature would tell us that sports specialization, as we have come to embrace it in our society, really ought not occur until probably 14 or 15 at the earliest. There are some who would even argue that it's even later than that. There are some exceptions; swimming and diving, gymnastics. There are some sports where there are clear competitive advantages to having that smaller body type, but by and large, most team sports are better populated by good athletes who happen to play soccer and baseball and whatever else you want to throw in there.

Skye:
So what exactly is the connection between long-term athletic development and not necessarily specializing in a sport?

Toby:
Well, what LTAD tells us is that you can think about learning how to move much like we think about learning to speak, and if I want to become fluent as a mover, just kinesthetically, I want to have good ability to accelerate, to decelerate, to be protected against injury. Then just like speaking, I can't learn to become fluent in a language if I never speak it. If all I ever do is play softball, which here in Lubbock where I'm at, softball, baseball tends to be a big emphasis, and then later on football. If that's all they ever do, they'll become proficient at that sport, but you have to recognize that that time spent focusing on that one particular sport is time not spent exposing yourself to a broader movement vocabulary, if you will.

So it's almost like if I decide, okay, I want my kid to be the best possible English speaker for these 20 words that I'm going to give them, they might become really proficient at speaking 20 words, but in a lot of ways we've hampered, well in that example, we have absolutely hampered their development. Doesn't matter how good you are at speaking 20 words if there are thousands of others that you never learned how to speak.

Skye:
Yeah, that's actually a great explanation. What about, this wasn't the case for me, my daughter wasn't necessarily so excited about going to practice every time when she was eight, nine, 10, but there's some families that I know that they just can't get their kids off the field. They don't want to play another sport, they only want to be involved with soccer. What's your advice for those parents?

Toby:
I love John O'Sullivan's quote about this. He says, "My daughter loves macaroni and cheese and if she had her way, that's all she'd ever eat, but that's not what's in her best interest." And I love the parallel there.

Skye:
I see. It seems like soccer from a specialization standpoint, and I'm talking about kids that are opting to start focusing only on soccer at the age of 13 or 14, that's what we're seeing here. Some places around the country, it's certainly different at a younger age, but that's what we're seeing here in the Richmond, Virginia area. It doesn't seem like that bad of a sport to specialize in in terms of there's lots of different movements you're running, it's slow movements, longer movements, fast, jumping, all of that.

Toby:
Yeah, I would concur with that completely. I think in terms of developing that movement vocabulary that we talked about, soccer's one of the better team sports just because there's so much space and you're interacting with other player. I mean you have to avoid opponents and that's a far cry from something like baseball or softball where even from a motor development standpoint, a lot of things in soccer are feedback skills. In other words, you're responding and reacting to someone else or the path of the ball or anything like that. That's going to help develop athletic skill, not just soccer skill, but athletic skill.

If you've played soccer, you've developed that ability to react. And now when you're 25 and decide you want to play tennis with your spouse, believe it, I mean there's a lot of crossover there. If all we've ever done is baseball, there's some reactivity, but a lot of it is feed forward where I know I'm going to try to steal that base and there may or may not be anything in my path, hopefully not.

Track and field, I mean yes, it will develop athleticism, but there are hardly any skills in track and field that feed back. Everything is about, I'm running this distance or I'm clearing this height. Everything's volitional. And so that wouldn't necessarily make me a great tennis player because everything I've done, I had a plan in place and I was acting on the plan and I haven't necessarily learned how to adapt or adjust when that plan gets upended by an opponent.

Skye:
Yeah. What are the best things that you think kids can do at the age of 10, 11, 12 in terms of mixing up? If they're playing soccer, because that's what we're all about here, what are some other sports or activities that we should consider getting our kids involved in?

Toby:
I think the general athletic development stuff like the speed and agility camps and things of that nature are good. Gymnastics is fantastic. The problem is it's uber specialized too, so it's hard to find a club where you can plug your kid in for two months out of the year and then pull them back out and take them to another sport.

Skye:
What about TaeKwonDo or karate or-

Toby:
Absolutely. That's something we've considered. We haven't enrolled our kids, but there's a lot of just mental discipline. But again, the camps are nice because they're usually prepackaged as 16 sessions and you're done and you go to your other sport. Whereas something like martial arts is more intended, it's built around the long-term athletic development model. I mean the whole belt system is intended to have you earn your way over time. I mean you couldn't just go in and two weeks later become a black belt. You have to go through the time to earn those things.

And one thing the OISCA did with the Athletic Revolution franchises is they basically built it such that you earn levels as an athlete, there are actually nine levels of progression, and they'll note it with an armband. There's nine different colors of armband. So if you look out on the training floor, it's just like karate, you see a brown belt and a black belt and you know right away that that athlete has tested out and has displayed a certain level of proficiency. Well-

Skye:
So tell me more of what you're talking about, because I'm not sure. You're talking about the International Youth Conditioning Association?

Toby:
Yeah.

Skye:
So, explain that a little bit.

Toby:
That's the organization that I wrote the book most recently for. I was their Director of Research and Education for 10 years. We were basically founded in the, I started very early on, I think '05, '06, and the whole idea was this was right when this early specialization thing was really starting to take off in a lot of places, and so the intent was to provide coaches and in particular personal trainers with some tools so that they could kind of carve out a niche in the personal training industry and set themselves apart as being a specialist who understood that kids aren't just little adults.

I can't just take the University of North Carolina Strength and Conditioning Program for soccer and have my 13-year olds doing it. And that's what a lot of people do. We'll cut two reps off and we'll say we're making it easier for kids. Well, it doesn't work that way. From a neurologic standpoint, they're a completely different creature and they need different stimulus in order to be optimized. So the OISCA was built around this whole long-term athletic development model, and then subsequently, probably five years after that, they helped form one of the franchises that is out there that you may see in some towns called Athletic Revolution where kids can go train either between seasons or year round in pretty much anything you want.

Skye:
Right. So it sounds like that's something you'd recommend for parents who have that kid that just really loves soccer, but they have a break, they're able to do something else. It's sometimes hard to plug into basketball when they're 11 and they haven't ever played before, or softball. My daughter played softball, that was a long season, we'll get into that. So it sounds like that's something you'd recommend?

Toby:
Yeah, there's that and it seems like the entry points get harder and harder every year. Like you said, if you're not in the stream for softball and you don't know the parents and you don't know the coaches, then your kid gets overlooked and they ride the bench and it's frustrating. So some things we've tried is plugged them into some other recreational leagues that maybe aren't as competitive and just recognize that it's just like in college, you're not going to love every class you take, but hopefully they all serve a purpose.

And so if the purpose of playing on the rec league softball team was for your daughter to learn how to be an encourager and not grumble and complain when she doesn't get to start and play, then maybe that was the purpose of that season. But again, I'm a big proponent in taking a hard look at what we're doing and making sure that our kids are learning the lessons.

Skye:
Good. Well, this is all great information and good luck with your book. It's called The Essentials of Long-Term Athletic Development. Is that right? Good.

Toby:
That's right.

Skye:
Well, we'll be looking out for that. And I appreciate your time today.

Toby:
Thank you so much.

Skye:
Yep.