Just in case there wasn't enough pressure....

The latest from Williamsport - Little League World Series video scouting reports. Ugh.

Until It Hurts, the Video

Beacon Press just put out this short clip about Until it Hurts. Thanks to Jessie Bennett, Digital Content Developer and Blog Editor at Beacon.

PGA Championship winner had a real childhood

Keegan Bradley, the new PGA Championship winner, set himself apart in so many ways last week. He won one of golf's four major championships in his first season on the PGA Tour. He won with an improbable back nine that included a triple bogey (to drop him five shots off the lead with three holes to play) followed by back-to-back birdies. Even more remarkably, he won the first major championship he ever played in.

There's one more biographical footnote that separates Bradley from other tour pros. He had a childhood.

More accurately, he had a normal childhood. Bradley grew up in Vermont, the son of a teaching golf pro. His aunt, Pat Bradley, was one of the most successful players on the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour in the 1970s and 1980s. The adults in Keegan's life had the good sense to allow golf to be a part of his life, not his whole life.

Increasingly, that's an unusual way for kids with sports talent to grow up, as Bill Pennington explained this morning in the New York Times.

Although he is the son of a club teaching pro and the nephew of the L.P.G.A. Hall of Famer Pat Bradley, he did not specialize in golf as a youngster. He did not enroll in a hundred golf camps or travel away from home, boarding in a golf academy. He did not follow the path that is now so common to precocious athletes in most sports across America, which is to say he spurned suggestions he should quit all other sports and play golf year-round.

Bradley grew up in central Vermont. He was a ski racer in the winter and a golfer in the summer.

“People ask me all the time how I could be a pro golfer from Vermont, and they assume I must have went south a lot,” Bradley said Saturday. “But the truth is that when it started to snow, I put my clubs in the basement and didn’t touch them.”

In Until It Hurts, I write about kids who become early specialists. By eight or nine years old, they are full-time soccer goalies or tennis players. A small percentage of these children become fabulous players. They become varsity college athletes, attending school on full athletic scholarship. A few even become professional stars playing in big stadiums and earning millions of dollars a year.

Sadly, most do not. They advance as far as their talent will take them, usually high school sports -and no farther. Or the steady diet of one sport - spring, summer, fall and winter - eventually wears them down before they even get that far. As I write in Until It Hurts, they become victims of overuse injuries, ruptured ligaments, growth-plate injuries and the like. Or the sport ceases to be fun. Or what they want to do. So they quit before ever reaching their potential.

Keegan Bradley's parents played it right. They allowed their son to have a childhood, to explore many interests and eventually to excel at one. Keegan is the hero this week. Mr. and Mrs. Bradley deserve their own slice of the spotlight.

A new study confirms an old one on kids and curves

Back in 2009, I wrote an article for the New York Times citing a study that concluded there isn't much evidence to link curveballs and arm problems among kid pitchers. According to the study, the far more serious problem was overuse - too many pitches thrown over seasons dragging on too many months. It turned conventional thinking about kid pitchers and throbbing elbows on its head. Yet the study's primary author, Glenn Fleisig, was quite sure about which way his data pointed.

From the article:

Why for so many decades have most doctors and youth coaches believed otherwise? Fleisig said the evidence had been based largely on anecdotes, and that over the years those stories simply began to sound like fact.

“Why did people believe the world was flat? Because one guy told another it was flat and it looked flat. Until someone discovered that it wasn’t,” he said.

Fleisig took a lot of heat for the study and for refusing to back away from its conclusions. This week, vindication of sorts. A five-year study conducted at the University of North Carolina and commissioned by Little League Baseball reached the same conclusion.

As Glenn said in the Times article, no one is urging ten-year-olds to snap off a curve every other pitch. But data are data, and the curveball apparently isn't as harmful as many of us thought. And I have both hands raised on this one. In 2005, I wrote a piece for the Times lamenting the all-curve all-the-time approach of many youth pitchers at the Little League World Series. I should have been writing about pitch counts.

Paying for a field hockey tutor, before taxes

This makes sense. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) just introduced a bill that would allow you and me to use pre-tax dollars to pay for heath and fitness expenses. So just as we can set aside a few thousands bucks (pre-tax) for medical expenses now, the same could be done to pay for the gym membership, the yoga class, maybe the youth soccer registration.

“Regular physical activity is the best preventive medicine we can prescribe,” Brady said this week. “This bill will give people another incentive to get active – to participate in that exercise class, join a sports team, or sign up for a fitness program.”

I like the idea. I see a few complications, though. Like what exactly is an allowable expense? I drop my kid off at the batting cage and she goes through ten dollars in quarters. My son enters the New York City Marathon. I sign up my kid for field hockey lessons at $50 a pop. I bought a Nintendo Wii. I bought six Nintendo Wiis. My wife had a baby on Monday. Tuesday, I order Baby Goes Pro on DVD. How far can I push this envelope?

What's truly remarkable about the bill - especially this week - is that it's supported by Republicans and Dems. Ron Paul and Earl Blumenauer, who I'm guessing rarely agree on what time it is, are co-sponsors. If nothing else, let's give this group credit for getting along.

A sports parents' guide to concussions

Recently I completed the manuscript for "The Most Expensive Game in Town: The Rising Cost of Youth Sports and the Toll on Today's Families." It's a book about Corporate America, big money and how they're changing the games that our kids play. Beacon Press is publishing in March. More about the book - and the reporting that went into it - in the coming months.

My next project is a book about kids sports and concussions. This time, I'm fortunate to be collaborating with Robert Cantu, a neurosurgeon and pioneering expert in the field. Dr. Cantu is an adviser to the National Football League and one of those responsible for nudging the league to a more sensible place in protecting players. He's also co-founder of the Sports Legacy Institute, a remarkable organization studying brain disease among ex-athletes. More than 300 pro and amateur athletes have willed their brains to the institute, including the NFL Hall of Famer John Mackey, who died this month after a long struggle with dementia.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is publishing the book. We hope it will be a valuable resource for sports parents and coaches - kids too.

I'm meeting a number of remarkable former youth athletes whose experiences with concussions have forced them to quit sports. In many cases, they've turned their energies in other directions, often with the goal of sparing other kids the trouble that came their way. Here's one shining example, a short documentary on concussions created by Catholic University student TJ Cooney. You really ought to take a few minutes to watch this.

The Silent Epidemic from TJ Cooney on Vimeo.

Swipe your credit card at WorkOut Kid Web site

In this space, we've commented before on kids barely old enough to cross the street alone yet who are Youtube sports stars - in auto racing, boxing, billiards, tennis, gymnastics. What am I forgetting? Something, I'm sure. The billiards champ was two. The prize fighter, all of seven, had a Web site and had recorded a hit single.

I just learned about the The WorkOut Kid. He's ten and - yes, an Internet sensation. The video above has already passed one million views on YouTube. At the WorkOut Kid Web site, there are the usual opportunities to swipe a credit card - $19.99 for the WorkOut Kid DVD, $29.95 for the WorkOut Kid backpack.

Kids' gyms and fitness training also are the subject of an article this week in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Interesting piece that mostly explores how fitness clubs are catering to younger and younger customers.

From the BW article:

Jeff Martin, director of youth programming for CrossFit Brand X, a health club in Ramona, Calif., claims his business has doubled in the past three years and that the majority of his new clients are underage. “We have kids coming into our gym now who are 2½, 3 years old,” Martin says. Brian K. Maloney, director of fitness and education at New York City’s Visions Wellness Center, believes his gym is attracting a younger crowd mainly because it allows it. “Unlike a lot of health clubs and private gyms, which won’t let you work out in the weight room unless you’re 16 or older, our insurance covers younger members,” says Maloney, who charges $70 and up for pre-adolescent sessions. “We cater to people who have the money,” he says.

I see how the adults nudging these kids to center stage are benefiting - financially and otherwise. Still waiting for a sports medicine expert to step forward to say this is healthy for kids.

Thank you, Rabbi Michael Green.