The Strong Youth Project aims to improve organized sports for youth
Youth sports games come to a heartbreaking stop all too often when players take a knee on the field to show respect for an injured teammate. These too-common moments often mark the end of a young athletic career for teens, and potentially lead to a decreased likelihood that they become physically active adults.
Research shows that when young athletes specialize in one sport too early, the chance of injury and burnout increase and their athletic performance often decreases. About 3.5 million sports-related injuries occur annually in athletes ages 14 and younger, and many of these injuries stem from overtraining (or specializing) in one sport.
BYU exercise science professor Matt Seeley is passionate about bringing awareness to the cause. He created the Strong Youth Project after watching all five of his children participate in youth sports. While he loves the many invaluable benefits of youth sports, he laments that his children often miss family activities for practice or face pressures to compete in sports during the offseason. These concerns have fueled his collaboration with professors from disciplines across BYU’s campus to improve organized sport experiences for youth, parents and coaches.
“If we as adults, who are supporting youth sports, can get it right, we can help our young athletes experience immense benefit through organized sport participation,” Seeley said. “If we can produce resilient mentally stable and physically active adults, that’s a win.”
The Strong Youth Project is striving to do just that. The initiative has three aims: educate parents and stakeholders about the facts surrounding youth sports, including adverse effects of sports specialization, conduct scientific research on youth sport experiences, and design evidence-based training programs for young athletes. Seeley quickly learned that these priorities aligned with those of professors from all disciplines, with faculty from psychology, computer science, physical education, and statistics included on the project’s advisory board.
The expertise of these professionals and Ed Eyestone, two-time Olympian and director of BYU Track and Field, were recently featured at the first-ever Strong Youth Project Conference. The speakers touched on struggles that all athletes face—mental health and performance, body image and self-esteem, sleep and athletic performance, strength and conditioning, sports nutrition, and athletic injury prevention. However, efforts reach far beyond the conference.
The Strong Youth Project has partnered with local coaches, physicians and athletic trainers to collect data on the physical wellbeing of athletes to prevent injuries. Players fill out a survey each night detailing the quality of their sleep, hydration levels, points of muscle pain and mental health. The information is then given to athletic trainers and coaches to strategically design workouts to meet the needs of their teams. Seeley hopes that these indicators could one day lead to a significant decrease and prevention of player injuries.
The project leaders have also recruited the help of nearly 50 undergraduate students at BYU to assist young athletes playing soccer, basketball or volleyball in strength and conditioning exercises. For many of these undergrads, training sessions provide firsthand experiences to learn about the benefits of evidence-based coaching, as the students have ample knowledge of theory but less practical experience prescribing strength and conditioning protocols to real-life athletes.
BYU sophomore and certified personal trainer Jace Jessup coaches teens daily at the Shooters Soccer Club in Spanish Fork, Utah. While he plans to study entrepreneurship at BYU, Jessup feels that this project has helped him discover potential career goals, like opening a gym as part of his business endeavors.
“I’m super grateful for the opportunity to work with these kids simply because it gives me lots of experience and shapes my confidence as a coach,” Jessup said. “I’m passionate about physical fitness, so being able to help others grow in theirs is really fun.”
The motivation behind youth sports specialization is often to qualify for a D1 scholarship or to become a professional athlete. However, the chance of this occurring is only one in 100 or less. Based on the data, the Strong Youth Project hopes to inform parents and coaches of more attainable outcomes while assisting young athletes in a long pursuit for healthy participation in sports.
“There are far more heroes in youth sports than villains,” Seeley said. “And the villains are often just misinformed.”
