Playing too hard? As young athletes train nonstop, doctors are seeing a big rise in injuries.

AuthorPennington, Bill
PositionSPORTS

Jeret Adair, a top young pitching prospect from Atlanta who started 64 games in one summer for his baseball team, last year underwent an elbow reconstruction that was once reserved for aging major leaguers.

'YOU PLAY WITH PAIN'

"My arm hurt for years, but I never went to the doctor," says Adair, 16, a junior at Riverwood High School. "Like they say, you play with pain. If you're a good pitcher on a team of 14- or 15-year-olds, you're going to be throwing too much. Everybody wants to throw their ace out there."

When Ana Sani of Scarsdale, N.Y, was a 13-year-old budding soccer star, she practiced daily until she tore a ligament in her left knee. After a 10-month rehabilitation, she returned to playing soccer--on three teams at the same time. Now 18, Sani has finished her first season on the soccer team at Williams College in Massachusetts. She recently tore cartilage in the same knee.

Around the country, doctors in pediatric sports medicine say it is as if they have happened upon a new childhood disease, and the cause is the overaggressive culture of organized youth sports.

"They are overuse injuries pure and simple," says Dr. James Andrews, a prominent sports orthopedist who performed the elbow surgery on Adair. "You get a kid on the operating table and you say to yourself, 'It's impossible for a 13-year-old to have this kind of wear and tear.' We've got an epidemic going on."

EARLY SPECIALIZATION

Typical injuries range from stress fractures, growth-plate disorders, cracked kneecaps, and frayed heel tendons, to a back condition brought on by excessive flexing that causes one vertebra to slip forward over another. Most are injuries once seen only in adults.

One factor has been repeatedly cited as the prime cause for overuse injuries among young athletes: specialization in one sport at an early age and the year-round, almost manic, training for it that often follows.

"It's not enough that they play on a school team, two travel teams, and go to four camps for their sport in the summer," says Dr. Eric Small, who has a family sports-medicine practice in Westchester County, N.Y. "They have private instructors for that one sport that they see twice a week. Then their parents get them out to practice in the backyard at night."

Dr. Angela Smith of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia says parents are pushing their children to excess in pursuit of college scholarships or the dream of a professional sports career. "The volume of training has...

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