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Facing Fierce Competition
Courtney Thompson was so passionate about gymnastics that the 11-year-old would practice five hours a day until her arms were sore and her elbows swollen. Following the regimen recommended by her coach at the gym near her home in Chester, New Hampshire, she'd practice a single move and repeat it a hundred times. She'd then apply ice packs to her aching elbows. The pixieish youngster, 4'8'' and 70 pounds in her purple leotard, rarely complained about her grueling schedule, and for good reason. After three years of competition, Courtney was ranked the best gymnast in the state for her age, and she dreamed of going to the Olympics.But on January 12, 2005, while practicing a routine floor exercise, she stopped in mid-tumble and grabbed her left elbow. "I felt a pain that just about killed me," she recalls. Her coach suggested that she finish the routine, but all Courtney could do was cradle her limp arm while trying mightily to hold back tears.
X-rays revealed nothing suspicious and her doctors, assuming she'd pulled a ligament, advised rest. But as months passed and Courtney returned to training, she became unable to straighten her arm or perform without needing ice packs. In May, her worried family took her to the sports medicine division of Children's Hospital Boston, where an MRI revealed a more serious injury: osteochondritis dessicans (OCD), otherwise known as "Little League elbow." Courtney's many months of repeating front-giant swings on the horizontal bar had caused the cartilage to shear off the bone in her left elbow, leaving her with the crooked arm of a grizzled baseball pitcher. Two days later, Courtney underwent surgery and began a slow, painful rehabilitation.
What happened to Courtney Thompson is a red flag in America's growing epidemic of youth sports injuries. Across the country, younger and younger athletes are injuring themselves in the relentless pursuit of sports achievement. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reports that 2.8 million Americans ages 5 through 24 received medical treatment for a sports- or recreation-related injury in 2003. The complaints range from broken bones and concussions to torn ligaments, frayed tendons and lower back stresses. Severe injuries that used to be limited to major league professionals are now showing up in high school and even junior high athletes. "We're seeing more kids in emergency rooms for sports injuries than from any other cause," says Dr. Jordan Metzl, medical director of the Sports Medicine Institute for Young Athletes in New York City.
There are many reasons behind the outbreak in sports injuries, but most experts agree on one: the extreme culture of organized youth sports. Gone are the days when children played a variety of games on sandlots and playgrounds. Child abductions and street crime have ended casual neighborhood athletics in many places, leading parents to enroll their children in organized sports under the watchful, though demanding, eyes of adult volunteers and coaches. And movies like Friday Night Lights, Miracle and Ice Princess glorify the thrill of victory for young athletes with single-minded dedication to athletic achievement.
From high school gyms to county ball fields, 41 million children younger than 19 participated in organized youth sports in 2005, according to the latest research by the National Council of Youth Sports. The figure represents a 25 percent increase since 1997.
Parental involvement in youth sports has also made childhood games less about having fun and more about training and competing for the top spot, landing a college scholarship or launching a lucrative career. Hoping to nurture the next Michelle Kwan or Apolo Ohno, some parents steer their children into specializing in one sport. But the repetitive training required to master a sport places enormous stresses on bones and muscles that are still developing. Medical journal The Physician and Sportsmedicine reported that 30 to 50 percent of youth sports injuries are caused by overuse. If left untreated, these injuries can develop into more serious problems such as arthritis. "We're starting to see 12-year-old kids look like 40- and 50-year-olds in terms of stress on their bodies," says Roch King, PhD, coordinator for the graduate coaching program at Ball State University. King, who also coaches a kids' volleyball team, observes that some youngsters compete in more games than college players. "What's driving youth sports is a belief that if children don't dedicate themselves to one sport by age 6, they'll never be any good at it," he says.
Some youngsters accept injury as the price they pay for pursuing a sport they love. Kevin Butcher, a 15-year-old junior high school student from Fort Collins, Colorado, plays soccer for the Fort Collins Arsenal Soccer Club, which last year became state champion. Over the course of that winning season, Butcher dislocated a bone in one foot, sprained both ankles several times and, for one month-long, four-game stretch, endured pelvic pain that a doctor later diagnosed as a fractured left hip. "There's a kind of glory in playing through pain," he says. "You want to be there for your team, no matter what." His coach, who calls Butcher "a warrior," forced him to rest for a month after the hip fracture, but welcomed his defender back to the team in time for the state championship tournament.
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