To Excel in Sports, Try Them All

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Tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams started playing tennis at age 4 and began playing professionally as teenagers. Similarly, golf phenomenon Tiger Woods first held a club at age 2 and won his first junior world championship at age 13.

These sports superstars play into the commonly-held belief that you need to start young and focus on one discipline to reach the highest levels. But other top athletes — like basketball’s Michael Jordan, hockey’s Wayne Gretzky, and swimming’s Michael Phelps — played a variety of sports as kids and only focused on their main sports as young adults.

A new systematic review in Perspectives on Psychological Science explores which path is more likely to achieve results. To find an answer, researchers combined the results of 51 studies with more than 6,000 athletes from 15 countries, with 43% of the athletes participating in individual sports and 57% in team sports. The pool of athletes also included more than 400 medalists in international competition.

First, researchers divided competitors into two levels: the junior level, which has teenage participants, and the senior level, which has no age restrictions with typical participants in their 20s and 30s. Interestingly, they found most world-class junior athletes do not become successful senior athletes; at the same time, most world-class senior athletes were not champions at the junior levels.

To achieve the greatest success at the junior level, the authors found athletes focused on their specific sports at younger ages, spent more time practicing their specific sport, and reached important milestones earlier. On the flip side, world-class adult athletes started their main sports later in life, spent less time practicing their main sports, and reached important milestones later.

In other words, the Williams sisters and Tiger Woods are anomalies. Most world-class adult athletes don’t achieve the highest levels of success until much later in life.

These trends held true in all types of sports including measurable sports such as swimming and running, game sports such as soccer and basketball, combat sports such as fencing and wrestling, and artistic sports such as diving and gymnastics.

The review does not offer evidence on why this may be true; however, the authors offer several hypotheses for future research:

• Participating in multiple sports in childhood may reduce the likelihood of overuse injuries or psychological burnout.
• Experiences in many sports may help young athletes better identify their talents.
• Diverse experiences may help youth become more well-rounded athletes later in life.

The findings, researchers say, set up a choice for parents of emerging athletes and high-level youth sports organizations: Do they want to seek out early success for their children at the junior level at the expense of success later in life, or focus on developing their child into a world-class senior athlete at the expense of success at the junior level?

There is some evidence that this question also applies to academic disciplines. The review authors point to a study by German researcher Anita Graf who examined the biographies of the 48 German Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, economy, and medicine since 1945.

Graf found that 42 of the 48 Nobel laureates studied more than one discipline or worked in fields outside of their award areas. Comparing them with winners of the Leibnitz prize, Germany’s highest national science award, Graf found the Nobel laureates took significantly longer to earn their full professorships and awards and were significantly less likely to receive a scholarship at a young age.

The take-home message is clear: In sports, and possibly in other disciplines, those who achieve success at the highest levels are more likely to have had diverse experiences.