Even in northern states like Nebraska baseball has become a year-round sport .  With the growth of fall baseball teams, camps and showcases and the coming of bigger and better indoor baseball training facilities, opportunties exist to work on one’s baseball skills throughout the fall and winter sports seasons.  And, there are plenty of good reasons to do so.  It’s a competitive world out there.  A few extra swings off the “Iron Mike” might be the difference between making the baseball team and starting a summer lawn mowing business.  And, at the team level, the extra reps over the fall and winter could mean the difference between playing for a championship or watching from the stands.  As a society, we value, and have to come to expect, excellence.  The straightest path to the winner’s circle seems to be commitment, hard work and focused, repetitive training in our chosen pursuit.

All well and good, and certainly players in a skill sport like baseball benefit from year-round drills and instruction on the building blocks of the game.  But, at the same time one could certainly ask the question “at what point in the life of young athlete should he or she begin to focus on just one sport?”  When baseball — or football or basketball or soccer, for that matter — becomes a year-round activity, the opportunities for a young athlete to participate in other sports diminish.  What is lost when that happens?

After talking to seventeen multi-sport athletes, their coaches and athletic directors this fall for our series on baseball-playing quarterbacks, my understanding of the benefits and challenges of multi-sport participation has been broadened.  Here are a few of the things I’ve learned:

1.  The multi-sport athlete benefits from competing in a variety of different situations.  Many of the athletes I talked to spoke of being able to transfer what they’ve learned from one sport to another.  Whether it’s a physical quality, such as strength or agility, or a mental attribute, such as the ability to focus and concentrate, there seem to be some core components that are common to all sports.  Developing those core components under fire in varying competitive situations seems to give the athlete greater confidence in his ability to compete and succeed in each of the sports in which he participates.

2.  The training for some sports emphasize certain of these core athletic components more than others.  Football emphasizes aggressiveness, one-on-one challenges, strength, speed, bursts of quickness and power.  Basketball emphasizes footwork, vision, leaping ability, aerobic conditioning, coordination, quick decision-making and precision.  Baseball emphasizes hand-eye coordination, arm strength, lateral movement, timing, precise repetitive motions, speed and quickness.  Likewise, sports such as wrestling, swimming and diving, soccer, tennis and golf each develop a unique collection of core athletic components.  When an athlete brings a broader range of well-developed athletic abilities to a particular sport, he has a “deeper well” to draw from.  He has more unique abilities to contribute to his team.  A team composed of individuals with a broad base of athletic experiences and abilities is going to able to respond better under adverse or novel circumstances since the players collectively have a broader range of experiences to draw from.

3.   Coaches and athletic directors have gotten the message that opportunities for athletes to play multiple sports must be encouraged and facilitated.  Top players can no longer be “hoarded” by a particular coach who wants those kids exclusively for his program.  In order for all of the teams from a school to be successful, coaches must share athletes and cooperate with one another.   Athletic directors, it appears, have become very proactive in promoting the kind of cooperation and coordination among their coaches that makes it possible for multi-sport athletes to avoid conflicting demands from coaches.

4.  Baseball is attracting the top multi-sport athletes in many schools.  That’s very good news for our sport.  As a sport, Nebraska high school baseball is better off if we have the state’s top athletes among our ranks rather than having them competing in track or soccer.  The signs are very encouraging so far, but we lag far behind in attracting African-American athletes to our sport.  Of the seventeen baseball-playing quarterbacks we interviewed, only one was an African-American.  Of course, this problem is not unique to Nebraska high school baseball, but is a major challenge for the sport of baseball at all levels, including Major League Baseball. 

At the end of the day, not every kid who has good baseball skills is going to have the athletic ability to compete at the varsity level in multiple sports.  Baseball is a skill game, and kids who may not stand out in terms of their overall athletic ability may still be successful ballplayers if given the opportunities to develop those skills through good teaching and persistent effort.  For those kids, year-round baseball opportunities may provide the key to a successful career at the high school level and beyond.  But we should also encourage and provide opportunities for the talented, multi-sport athlete to do what he or she does best — compete year round in a variety of sports to maximize his or her athletic potential. 

If we can put together a baseball team of both kinds of players — the skilled baseball player and the naturally-gifted, multi-sport athlete — then perhaps we have the best of all possible worlds for Nebraska high school baseball.