Premature v/s Precocius: the Young Athlete and Fencing

[gladius]

One of the best and least advertised products offered by the USFA to its members is in my personal opinion the quarterly magazine American Fencing. In it I always find more than one article of great interest covering various aspects of the sport and its community.

I'd like to point out in the Spring 2009 issue one article in the Rules & Referees section, Unhealthy Pressure at Youth Events, written by Jeff Bukantz.

There are other interesting articles in the current issue but this one peaked my attention because of another article appearing on Schermaonline.com covering the problems young athletes, premature and/or precocious, face when pushed by misguided parents or incompetent coaches.

We have had long discussions by people questioning and arguing why a precocious Y-10 fencer would be prevented to fence Y-14 or even cadet.

To all parents with kids who aspire to see them at future Olympic Games I strongly recommend the reading of both articles.

The article on Schermaonline was written by Aldo Carlo Cappellini, a pedagogue with a specialization in physical education and psychology, currently a professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Florence, Italy.

Hereunder is the link to the English translation of his presentation at the symposium "Sport Psychology for the Developmental Age: How to Form the Individual and the Fencer," organized by the Club Scherma Torino, on January 24, 2009.

http://www.schermaonline.com/scherma...rder=1&thold=0

I hope you'll enjoy both articles.

[Allen Evans]

I cannot help but wonder if there is a coincidence that American’s problem with youth obesity began about the same time that Americans begin to heavily promote organized youth sports with an emphasis on early competitive results.

It is true that this early promotion may have resulted in the discovery of some exceptional athletes. But I also wonder if it didn’t promote a lifetime belief in the children who didn’t immediately excell at sports --or just didn't mesh with the imposition of lots of structure on "play" -- that they were “failures” at sport, and they drifted off to other behavior.

[brucejy]

I was an active youth fencer from pre-teen years through to the NCAA. I fenced at Salle Auriol with the Marx brothers. My brother and I were pushed very hard-- we were not natural athletes, but with 3x/wk training and weekly lessons with Yves Auriol, we became pretty good. The training paid off for me. I got into a good college, made varsity, lettered and went to easterns every year and NCAA nationals once. My brother, who was better than I, quit around age 14, told my parents that he hated their behavior at tournaments and refused to even talk about fencing-- completely burned out.

I am now a physician and the father of overweight children. We are active in youth soccer and just starting lacrosse. I have a really hard time controlling my own desire to push my kids as hard as I was pushed and as hard as I pushed myself. I find it hard to realize that I can help my kid do better by just keeping my mouth shut and relaxing.

Last year, I cared for a very ill man in the ICU. He was a Cincinnati Red pitcher who pitched in the World Series. As he recovered, he and I spoke a lot about kids and sports. He told me that he never played organized baseball until the sixth grade. He also told me not to get my kids into serious competitive athletics until they were in Jr. High. He also admonished me to not allow weight training or timing as that would likely hurt the development of the little child. The last thing he said to me was "if you want your kid to be in the World Series, don't start them too young."

My solution to this is to go to the park practically every day. We just play. We have soccer practice twice a week. Our record is 0-5. I have another, disabled, son who is active in special olympics swimming. He swims for training twice a week for two hours and competes. He loves pushing for every stroke. He loves encouragement. For both kids, their weight is falling as we enter into an active, playful lifestyle. We get familiar with each other as active persons and get comfortable with ourselves as active persons.

My advice to parents in the fencing world is that fencing has a very strong self-esteem component to it. That is, the kid has to feel worthy of facing his opponent and has to feel that winning the bout is a natural outgrowth of his otherwise happy, well-rounded life. Gentle, genuinely happy, non-obsessive parents are essential. Social and emotional boundaries have to be preserved. Let the pep talk happen before the tournament and NEVER criticise on the way home in the car.

We don't live in a city with fencing program. If we did, we would participate. For those of you who do live in areas with a good fencing club, you are lucky. It is a rich honor to be able to just participate in such a classy sport.

[jeff]

Very nice, brucejy. I can't think of a wiser or more mature post here. Thanks for the insight.

[gladius]

I suggested both articles by Cappellini and Bukantz because in my opinion they highlight the same problem from different angles: inappropriate and deleterious adult interference on the young athlete.

I don't know if I'd agree that one of the consequences directly attributable to this failure in the system is the present rate of obesity in young kids but it is something interesting to debate. I am not a physician or a dietician but as a (former) physicist I know how to calculate calories and balance them in an isolated system.

One hour of the most strenuous crosscountry skiing (uphill) will burn about 1,300 calories (depending on body weight) and if you eat a big mac with medium fries afterwards (say in 10 minutes) plus a coke you'll have recouped almost the same amount of calories...

The problem of obesity is in what and how much you eat. Exercise helps for sure since presumably while you exercise you don't eat, but it should be clear that proper nutrition is at the core of being well.

For those interested in the discussions on Schermaonline.com, I posted the English translation of the Italian comments.

http://www.schermaonline.com/scherma...rder=1&thold=0

[piste off]

I cannot help but wonder if there is a coincidence that American’s problem with youth obesity began about the same time that Americans begin to heavily promote organized youth sports with an emphasis on early competitive results.

It is true that this early promotion may have resulted in the discovery of some exceptional athletes. But I also wonder if it didn’t promote a lifetime belief in the children who didn’t immediately excell at sports --or just didn't mesh with the imposition of lots of structure on "play" -- that they were “failures” at sport, and they drifted off to other behavior.

I have to believe that the weight issue has to do with lower activity levels of the youth today. In my neighborhood, we lived on Slurpees and Velveeta but we were non-stop. Baseball, football, street hockey, biking and assorted other physical activities. No video games or other couch-potato pastimes.

Unfortunately, even back then kids were driven to be competitive. There were a lot of organized sports that I did not get involved with because I thought I missed the boat from an experience standpoint. That thinking was wrong (I finally went out for wrestling my junior year in H.S., becoming captain my senior year of a team that went on to win nationals), but I still have the same thoughts about my own kids who I know will be late bloomers.

R-

[Allen Evans]

I think my point is that many children don't sing, or play an instrument, or work at math, or engage in sports because at some point in their lives, someone (usually an adult) convinced them that they weren't any good at it, based on some adult-centric measure of performance or ability, and at an early age.

[Dev]

I think my point is that many children don't sing, or play an instrument, or work at math, or engage in sports because at some point in their lives, someone (usually an adult) convinced them that they weren't any good at it, based on some adult-centric measure of performance or ability, and at an early age.

There's also a cultural influence at work here. The United States in particular is a society famous for hurling wads of money, attention, hype, excitement, et al toward those who are freakishly gifted (primarily in sports, though you can do pretty well as a photogenic pop star with the magic of AutoTune). Those people, though they are rare, become the ideal and somehow the basis for comparison; it's a simple trap for an impressionable person, especially a child, to internalize that comparison and generate a false set of expectations. It's not enough to be a respectable fencer--you've got to be Gerek Meinhardt or you're nothing.

Though I believe occasionally that the kids are explicitly told that they're not good at (sports, music) the activity by an adult-centric performance measure, it's more common to see them generate the expectation themselves because the overabundance of attention paid to the one rare, freakish success story.

Perhaps one NFL team every five years burns a first-round draft pick on a rookie quarterback who does, indeed, become the savior of the franchise. But because of that one success story, every rookie quarterback rolls into the NFL with that burden of expectations and the vast majority of them flame out and are later "celebrated" as "busts" or "choke jobs" or whatever other schadenfreude-centric derision the public and media choose to heap on them.

Despite relative success in various fields, U.S. sports culture isn't exactly the healthiest around.