Canadian decathlete Damian Warner, twice an Olympic medalist, competes in the high jump at the 2024 Hypomeeting in Götzis, Austria.Ulf Schiller/Supplied
To earn his first Olympic gold medal, Damian Warner followed what is becoming an increasingly unlikely path: He didn’t play organized sports until he was 16 years old. He didn’t specialize until 20. If he gets to the 2028 Summer Olympics as planned, he will be the oldest decathlete in the history of the games at 38 years old.
“This is something I’ve always chosen to do,” he says. “I love sports and I tried to get better at it through my own terms.”
Damian Warner plays soccer as a child.Supplied
So much of what goes into making a professional athlete is unknown. Is it genetics? Superior discipline? What we do know is that children who specialize early – training eight months or more per year in a single sport before the age of 12 – are more likely to leave their sport because of injury or mental and emotional burnout, have just a slight chance of going professional and are less likely to be active into adulthood.
If the goal of most parents is to raise a child who becomes a healthy, happy adult, encouraging them to train early at a high level of intensity appears to be counterproductive. So why do we keep doing it?
A generation ago, sport specialization was less common. There isn’t one clear moment when this shifted, but maybe it was Malcolm Gladwell’s popularization of the 10,000-hour rule – which asserts it takes that long to achieve true expertise – in 2008. Or maybe it started earlier, suggests Mark McGuire, executive director of Give and Go Sport Education, with the stories of Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters, who drilled their sports early and near exclusively and became champions.
“They’re anomalies,” he says. According to one survey of around 4,000 parents, one in six believe their child has the talent to become a professional athlete, but the odds aren’t in their favour. For example, roughly one in 4,000 Canadian youth playing minor league hockey will make it to the NHL, according to a 2003 study. In the U.S., NCAA data show that only about one per cent of high school athletes get an athletic scholarship.
In many organized sports, if your child doesn’t specialize early, they may not get the chance to play at an older age (save for school teams). That brings its own sense of anxiety: ‘If I don’t push my kid hard on this now, they might miss their chance.’
“Sport is a business,” McGuire says. “Everybody gets caught up in this great big sports engine and nobody knows how to get off. And it’s going so fast.”
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There is so much to be gained from understanding that reaching your goals requires work. But it’s worth stepping back to examine the origin of those goals and how they might impact your child long-term.
The downside of early sports specialization
More than 70 per cent of Canadian youth play organized sports, according to 2025 data from the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute. That’s good news because participation helps prevent long-term health problems, reduces school dropout and builds self-confidence, perseverance and respect for others. In a 2025 report on the state of youth sport in Canada, 96 per cent of parents with children in organized sports reported positive impacts on physical health, and 93 per cent reported mental and emotional well-being.
When I connected with parents of children who specialize in their sport, most of their responses were positive. Elise Pulver’s 15-year-old daughter Brayden has been snowboarding competitively since she was 10 and trains year-round. Though Elise notes the high financial investment and challenges in shuttling Brayden to training and competitions, she says the sport has taught Brayden independence, resilience and how to get along on a team – all things she can carry into adulthood.
“It’s all she wants to do,” Elise says. Some parents also felt the benefits outweighed the drawbacks, citing improved discipline and an opportunity to learn how to deal with adversity and different personality types.
Still, in many cases, specializing early has the opposite effect many families are hoping for. A 2025 study in the journal Science reviewed findings for more than 34,000 adult high achievers, including Olympic athletes. It found that in most cases, early top performers are not the same people who are at the height of their game in adulthood.
Dropout rates are high: It’s estimated that 70 per cent of youth athletes drop out of organized sport by the age of 13. Girls drop out twice as much as boys. The reason cited most often? It’s no longer fun. Many of those adolescents may drop sports entirely. I have spoken to former youth and college athletes who find themselves lost when their structured sport ends, unsure of how to continue being active without a program, a coach or a game to prepare for.
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A 2020 review and meta-analysis of more than 300 studies found that youth between the ages of seven and 18 who specialized had “a significantly higher injury risk” than those who played multiple sports. Robert Litchfield, an orthopedic surgeon and the president of the Canadian Orthopaedic Association, says that most injuries for youth who specialize tend to be because of overuse or repetitive movement. (Gymnastics injuries, he notes, are usually acute or traumatic.) And if an individual keeps specializing after an injury, the risk of reinjury is “very high.”
An injury often extends beyond the physical. Many are forced to grapple with who they are without the sport that defines them.
“I see that at the competitive levels all the time,” says Dana Sinclair, a performance psychologist who works with athletes of all ages. They think: “If I don’t have any other skills and then I do get injured, then what am I? What do I have?” she says. It can lead to depression and anxiety.
Parents are often the biggest culprits in a child specializing too early, Sinclair says. “They want the best for their kids, of course,” she says. “But they push.”
To prevent this pressure from building, Sinclair suggests shifting how you talk to your child: Instead of asking them, “How did it go?” after a practice or a game, try, “How did you feel about it?”
Look for signs of burnout, such as avoiding practice sessions, decreasing levels of interest and diminished performance.
Warner says part of why he felt so confident trying different things was that his mother supported his passion but never pressured him to compete: ”I think that’s why I’ve been able to stay around so long.”
Warner competes in the javelin throw at the 2024 Hypomeeting. The London, Ont., athlete didn’t specialize in the decathlon until the age of 20.Ulf Schiller/Supplied
The perks of being a multisport athlete
Olympian Kelsey Mitchell once considered specializing in gymnastics as a child, but her parents pushed her to diversify. At 23, Mitchell was selected to train for the Olympics as a track cyclist because of her raw potential and power. She recalls being “so bad” the first time she went to a training session. But she also loved it.
Kelsey Mitchell grew up playing several sports, including soccer.Supplied
Mitchell won gold in sprint cycling at the Tokyo Olympics.Supplied
“I’m so happy and grateful that I had done so many different sports and put myself out there … because then it was normalized as an adult,” she says.
She went on to win a gold medal in cycling. Then, she switched to bobsleigh.
The experts I spoke to all prefer a multisport approach. “You’re stressing the body in different ways that are positive,” Litchfield says. “It allows you to balance out.”
McGuire points to the development of “figure-it-out skills” – learning how to solve problems and try new things.
Joe Siddall, a broadcaster for the Toronto Blue Jays and a former professional baseball player who didn’t specialize until after high school, says having different coaches helps youth adapt to varying styles of management, a skill that can be an asset in the professional world. “I think that’s probably one of the biggest life lessons that kids can learn from youth sport,” he says.
If your child loves one particular sport, it doesn’t mean you have to pull them away. But there’s tremendous value in learning that your skills and interests can extend beyond just one single activity.
“If you play a variety of sports, you realize there’s so much more to life than just one sport,” Mitchell says.
