How Big Is Your Pyramid?
If you want to build high, you have to first build wide.
With where we are now with organized athletics, it’s easy to see how you can get lost in the big picture. There’s so much out there that is offered for kids to get involved in and what I’m proposing here is that there could be an advantage to young athletes getting exposed to a lot of different athletic-based stimuli rather than focusing on one sport.
Exposure to different activities throughout the year will limit burnout and only grow an athlete's potential.
To make a visual representation, imagine the overall athletic profile of anyone as a pyramid. Everything that makes up this athlete, all the skills, knowledge of whatever sports they’re in, and talent make up this pyramid. The most important part of any pyramid is the base or foundation. This structure can only be as tall as the base is wide.
For example, let’s look at a middle school basketball player. This player loves basketball and it’s their goal to get a scholarship to play in college. They play for the middle school team in the winter, then they’re on a separate team that plays tournaments year-round. All this athlete does is go to camps, and practices, or play in games/tournaments without any other form of training or any other sport.
What are they pretty good at?
They can probably do the following things well: dribble, shoot, jump relatively well, do lay-ups, move laterally, have good hand-eye coordination, and have a good level of conditioning as well as great knowledge of the game. All of these things I listed represent a block that makes up the base of this athlete's pyramid, so we’re at eight blocks.
Remember, a pyramid can only be as tall as the base is wide. Now let’s add to the base. We’ll introduce a basic weight room work where we work on squatting, hinging, pushing, and pulling. There’s four more blocks. For movement, we’ll introduce a program where we work on plyometrics, acceleration, deceleration, change of direction, and max velocity. There’s five more blocks.
Just by adding basic weight room and movement training, we’ve expanded our base from eight blocks to seventeen blocks. Now this athlete’s pyramid has the potential to basically double in size.
Now let’s say this basketball athlete joined the lacrosse team in the spring. Just by getting involved in a different sport, they are expanding their base. They’ll get experience playing a different game with different rules. They’ll go from playing on a court to playing on turf or grass. They’ll have to develop a different type of hand-eye coordination, they’ll have to learn to play a game involving substantially more contact, different equipment, and the list goes on.
All of these different skills that they develop are only going to add to their base. Also, you never know what lessons or skills you develop while playing lacrosse that you could take with you that may make you a better basketball player.
With this increase today in “sport specialization” for kids, it’s not at all uncommon to see kids get totally burnt out on their sport. I grew up in the Midwest where wrestling is a big sport. Let me start off by saying that I love wrestling and I think it’s a great sport that is supported by great people. I’m so thankful for not just the athletic development I gained while wrestling, but the lessons I learned about life and about myself as a person.
Just in my small town, I had several friends who started wrestling when they were around four years old and that’s all they knew. They spent the fall preparing for the season and when it started, they were at tournaments almost every weekend. Then, when Folkstyle season ended they would go straight into freestyle and Greco-Roman season that would take them all the way through summer. It was an intense schedule for any kid and it wasn’t uncommon to see burnout.
By the time we got to high school, I had several friends who couldn’t wait to graduate so that they could be done, or who quit the sport altogether. This obviously wasn’t everyone, but it certainly wasn’t rare. I can’t help but think that if they would’ve taken time away from their main sport to do something different, maybe they wouldn’t have felt this burnout.
The point here is that you can’t expose kids, particularly younger athletes, to enough. Every sport or activity that they get experience with adds to their base, and ultimately, creates the potential for their pyramid, or athletic profile, to grow. Obviously, when a kid gets older and gets closer to finishing high school everyone will have a good idea of what they like to do and what they’re successful at.
If something like earning an athletic scholarship is your goal then by all means, make that sport more of a priority. But, if all you do is play one sport year-round since you were eleven or twelve years old, how do you even know that this is the sport for you? I’m not bashing any sport or saying that anyone is doing anything wrong. All sports are great, and I certainly wouldn’t be the person I’ve become without organized sports. I’m just proposing that in order to become the best athlete you can be, which should be the goal of anyone who competes, you have to have a strong base and foundation before you can reach your potential, and adding as much as you can to your base certainly helps.
