IS YOUR KID SUFFERING FROM BURNOUT?

Byline: Ross Siler GoodSports

From the start of April until the end of September, the 30 teams in Major League Baseball each play a 162-game regular-season schedule.

By the end of the year, though, their eighth-grade counterparts on the Patriots Baseball Club from Santa Clarita won't be far behind.

This year, the 14-and-under all-star traveling team will play more than 100 games - 60 in the spring and summer and 40 this fall. Factor in twice-a week-practices and it adds up to a schedule even coach Jeff Boersma admitted can be ``pretty obsessive.''

``It's hard, but it's fun,'' said Boersma's 13-year-old son, Jonathan, a pitcher, infielder and catcher on the Patriots. ``Baseball's my life.''

With the rise of elite travel and club teams, however, many parents and experts are worried about that same sentiment being echoed too often by young athletes who have schedules like the Los Angeles Dodgers, but are still years away from being able to drive themselves to practices and games.

One 10-year-old baseball player, profiled in last week's Sports Illustrated, will play 127 games this season, or more than 78 percent of the total played by the Atlanta Braves.

Experts increasingly are worried about athletic burnout. That, in turn, has given rise to concern about young athletes suffering from burnout even before they reach the high school level.

The critical ages for kids to drop out of sports are between 10 and 14, experts say, though Jonathan Boersma was not too concerned at the end of a Patriots practice last week.

``I've heard about people who've played so much that when they get to high school, they get sick of it,'' Jonathan said. ``But I don't think I'll ever get sick of baseball.''

The cautionary tales are there for parents, even if their children aren't old enough to appreciate them. More than a decade ago, Jennifer Capriati turned pro in women's tennis at 13, dropped out of the tour at 17 and was arrested on marijuana possession charges the following year. She has since returned to be one of the world's top players.

In addition, more and more children are choosing to play one sport year-round. In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a policy statement cautioning about such ``specialization'' and its propensity to cause burnout among young athletes.

It read: ``Young athletes who specialize in just one sport may be denied the benefits of varied activity while facing additional, physical, and psychological demands from intense training and competition.''

But travel teams only have gotten younger and more demanding.

On a field at Santa Clarita's Central Park last week, the 10-and-under Southern California Fury softball team was going through one of its twice- weekly practices. The team of third- and fourth-graders also hits at a batting cage once a week and plays in tournaments most weekends.

Coach Carl Butera, whose daughter Ashley plays on the team, said he and his assistants try to keep the game fun for the Fury, hosting sleepovers for the girls at each other's houses. But Butera also has seen parents reluctant to commit their children to playing on the team.

``There are a lot of good players that we can't get to come out,'' Butera said. ``The parents don't want to do it year-round at this age.''

From crisscrossing the country for tournaments to special sessions with sports psychologists, the demands of playing youth sports only have increased. On the Patriots, only a couple of Boersma's players play another sport in addition to baseball, usually basketball in the winter.

The coach, meanwhile, said the traveling team was created for one purpose: To prepare players for the rigors of high school baseball.

``We try not to overwork them,'' Boersma said. ``But next year they're going to go into high school and are going to be practicing and playing every day.

``(High school baseball) is highly competitive,'' he added. ``If you don't play travel ball, you're going to have a hard time making the team.''

Few athletes must contend with the schedules that top-level swimmers endure. At 5:24 a.m. last week, Buckley High of Sherman Oaks senior Geraldine Emmanuel jumped into the water at College of the Canyons for a pre-dawn training session with the Canyons Aquatics club team.

``It's a little cold,'' said Emmanuel, who set her alarm for 4:30 to make the drive from the San Fernando Valley. ``But it's a great wake-up call.''

Over the years, Canyons Aquatics has produced several Southern Section champions as well as an Olympic gold medalist in Anthony Ervin. As coach Bruce Patmos watched Emmanuel from the bleachers, he said the demands of the sport are greater than ever.

``It's gotten to the point,'' Patmos said, ``where if you want to be an elite athlete you have to swim six afternoons and one morning a week just to be competitive.''

Patmos' swimmers train six days a week and 10 times a week during the winter and spring. But only a few swimmers leave the program each year from burnout, added Patmos, whose practice requirements are less than several other elite programs.

Meanwhile, Hart of Newhall senior Kent Klawer, a Foothill League champion, said his friends who don't swim can't comprehend how he maintains his schedule. He's already been in the water for 90 minutes by the time school starts at 7:30 a.m.

``They're like, `How do you do it?' '' Klawer said. ``I say, `I'm a swimmer, that's just what I do.' ''

Giving it up

Now that she looks back on it, Jennifer Gould can tell she was different from other softball players just by the way she behaved on the mound. While other pitchers would pump their fist after recording a strikeout, Gould would shy away from celebration.

This is what Gould - now a lawyer practicing in Century City - said about her experience as a top softball player: ``I never really derived my identity from sports,'' she said. ``People sort of cast me in a certain way because I was so successful. But I never had that dominant competitive spirit.''

By the time Gould was named the City Section 4A Player of the Year in 1994, the star pitcher who started playing softball at age 9 no longer was a member of a travel team. Then Gould decided to give up the sport in college.

Gould said she wasn't suffering from burnout, if only because she didn't feel pressure to play. But at the least, she did have a different perspective on high-level softball.

``People were making it into buying $100 bats and 10 different kinds of batting gloves,'' Gould said. ``I never shared that level of seriousness. It seemed a little overdone.''

After graduating from El Camino Real of Woodland Hills, Gould turned down several softball scholarship offers and opted to attend Princeton. She wanted to be just a student. Her father, however, contacted Princeton's coaches and pursued a spot on the team for his daughter.

Now Dick Gould said he got it all wrong.

``I was saying, `You're going to go in there and you're going to dominate them,' '' Gould said. ``But, really, domination of the Ivy League was probably the furthest thing from her mind.''

Gould said she never bought into the seriousness of softball, despite starting four years on the varsity in high school. But Gould does remember many girls who were pushed too hard to achieve in sports.

``There were definitely a lot of girls with domineering fathers and way over-involved fathers,'' Gould said. ``They pushed them to levels they weren't happy with and didn't enjoy.''

Keeping it fun

One model that has worked in combating burnout is that of the Santa Clarita Warriors cross country team. At one of the team's weekly practices, a group of seven parents ran alongside the 40 children on the team during a workout at Central Park.

``Everybody hears about baseball and softball, but right off the bat, the parents are on the sidelines,'' Warriors manager Brian Rush said. ``These kids love to see their parents involved in what they're doing. For kids, it's really fun to see their parents participating.''

The Warriors' program is for kids 6-16 and features several nationally ranked youth runners. Some of its runners log as many as 30 miles a week, attending three evening practices from August to October and competing in weekend meets.

But the team retains 80 percent or more of its athletes from one year to the next, Rush said, largely because the focus is on fun and involvement. Rush added that many of his parents have realized that running with their kids affords them a chance to stay in shape.

``(The kids) hardly ever get burned out,'' he said. ``We don't ask them to do what they can't do. We challenge them, we ask them sometimes to get out of their comfort zone. But we don't ask them to do what they can't.''

As a writer on youth sports topics, Jonathan Buzby has another suggestion for leagues across the country: limit the number of practices. Several Catholic Youth Organizations across the country have mandated no more than three practices a week for their leagues.

``Right now,'' Buzby said, ``in most leagues not having limits, if one coach finds out that another coach is practicing four days a week, he's going to start practicing four days a week thinking that's what he needs to do to win.''

Buzby's 13-year-old son is playing in an eight-month youth hockey league that started in August and ends in April. That used to be three different seasons of sports for most athletes, he said. Now a soccer player can play in the fall and spring, plus indoors in the winter.

He said children as young as 7 can burn out on too many activities, with middle-schoolers the most likely to burn out on sports. Buzby added that many parents can suffer from burnout as well, when the shuffling of kids to practices and games gets to be too much.

Above all, however, Buzby said parents need to make sure their kids are enjoying their time in sports. That is the greatest way to prevent burnout.

``My theory always has been that kids give up on sports when sports stops being fun for them,'' Buzby said. ``That can be because of a parent whose always yelling and screaming or when it just gets to be too great of a time commitment.''

Ross Siler, [phone]

ross.siler(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) no caption (boy athlete slumping burdened by assorted sports balls)

Photo Illustration by Tom Mendoza 

(2 -- 5 -- color) no caption (children playing youth softball, baseball, football or soccer)

Photo by David Sprague

Photo by Michael Owen Baker

Photo by Gene Blevins

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