A Mom's Anxiety About Travel Sports

In part 1 of this 2 part episode, we sit down with Christen Snavely to discuss the common anxieties that many parents share when it comes to travel sports. Christen offers an unique perspective on this topic as she has 4 kids, all of whom have experience in the travel world. Her daughter is a high level dancer (ballet) and her 3 sons all play travel baseball (amongst other sports). She just also happens to be married to someone who was a 3 year baseball letter winner at Ohio State and was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays. Jason and I were both eager to hear her perspective.

We discussed the issue of how sports can very often become your identity, and this is something that can be very hard to move on from. Christen shares that her husband went through this when he decided to stop playing baseball. Jason and Christen both state that they do their best to educate their children about this issue in hopes they can avoid it. I point out that the case with many cognitive biases/issues is that even though you are aware of them, it doesn’t mean you are immune from them. Beliefs and identities can be very powerful forces.

Christen then identifies many of the questions that many travel parents struggle with. Is all this worth it? Is this safe or beneficial? Johnny over there has a private trainer, do I need a private trainer? Is this new training fad worth it? So many questions. Christen shares that many parents are eager to get some kind of clarification from experts in the field to help guide them through this crazy process.

Jason offered a good 2 point takeaway on long term athletic development for children. Number one: expose kids to multiple sports at an early age and give them opportunities to move and play in a fun way. Key word being fun, not forced. Number two: Don’t specialize in a sport before the age of 14. These are 2 great points that we feel can minimize injury and burnout and optimize performance.

We then dive in to the very commonly held belief that more practice always leads to better performance. That anybody can become elite if they just practice enough. This most likely has at least some of it’s roots from the infamous 10,000 hour rule that was written about in the Malcolm Gladwell book Outliers. Subsequent analysis and replication of this study paints a very different picture, and even the original author of the study himself has said 10,000 hours is hardly a rule. Mastery was achieved in one of the groups in the study with an average of 5,000 hours. A subsequent paper replicating the data shows such large standard deviations of practice time that it is nearly useless.

When looking at athletic development and what the future holds, nobody has a crystal ball. Athletic development is not linear. Performance doesn’t go in a straight upward line. It dips up and down with a hope of a trend towards better and better. We as parents need to make decisions with imperfect information (just as in life). We don’t know how life will change, how our child will change, what puberty will be like for them, or how the sports environment will change and what will be asked of them. Be willing to adjust as you gain more information and the overall picture becomes clearer.

Listen to our conversation here… Apple  Spotify  Google  Amazon

Simplified Takeaways…

1. Many travel parents struggle through the same anxieties of knowing what to do, what is needed or not, and how much is too much.

2. Having sports become your identity is a very real phenomenon that parents and children need to not only be aware of, but take steps to work against it.

3. Expose kids to many sports and opportunities to move and play at an early age and avoid specializing until at least 14 years of age.

4. More practice is not always the right answer. The 10,000 hour rule is far from a hard and fast rule. What is more accurate is saying practice is important, but knowing how much is appropriate has a wide range of variation according to the data.

Further Reading…

1.   The book Nick references on the podcast (Quit, by Annie Duke).

2.   Paper replicating the 10,000 rule study

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