By Jeremy McDonald

jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com

Sports has always been an outlet for me and many other people growing up.

But I was thinking, as the Winter Sports Season morphs into the Spring Sports Season and we see wrestlers and basketball players going to other sports:  Is the quick turnaround good?

It’s the age old question and I understand the reasoning of it because it’s too capitalize on the sports during the eight-,nine-month school year and give teams that wiggle room of schedule adjustments due to whatever may happen during said season.

Let’s look at this, when the two-sport, three-sport athletes enter the school year, they’ve had the summer months to relatively heal up, (assuming that athlete’s fall sports has a offseason program during the summer months), before gearing it back up for the fall.

My argument said of it is, kids are pushing themselves more and more now for that scholarship at the next level that we’re seeing more injuries, more burnouts, more exhaustion than probably before just to get this scholarship to a Division-I school.

Not to say that every kid has this happen or does happen to everyone, but it does happen on occasion and I think it starts from the quick turnaround and builds during the season itself.

Though the benefits stated above, I’m not sure if the timeframe in between Sport ‘A’ to Sport ‘B’ is long enough for athlete’s to heal up and get the conditioning needed for that said sport as each sport has different versions of conditioning for their particular sport though the conditioning base is there from the last sport.

I feel like there should be more time, an extra day, and extra week or something so kids won’t get hurt, either from fatigue of burnout, lack of healing time, etc.

Doing this, to give extra time, would avoid coaches bringing up Junior Varsity players sooner than they wanted to fill those Varsity spots due to whatever reason and teams aren’t struggling to make a run for the playoffs if they have a roster to make that run.

Answer this:  How many times we’ve seen that happen to teams and we try to figure out if it’s the coach, the player or whatever we might try to justify what happen?

That’s it from my soapbox, I enjoy the idea of a athlete doing several sports a year because of the benefits of all the good stuff that comes from it (responsibility, accountability, etc.), but I think we should give teams more time to prepare physically, mentality and from a spirit perspective would be very beneficial.