CONTACT: David Bell, drbell2@wisc.edu, 608-265-2891
Study: Highly specialized high school athletes more likely to have knee, hip injuries
MADISON – There is a sense among those who pay attention to youth and high school athletics that more and more young athletes today are focusing on excelling at a single sport instead of playing a variety.
Perhaps surprisingly, though, little research has been conducted on the prevalence of sports specialization in high school athletes – and what that might mean for these competitors’ health.
“Sport specialization is a hot topic in sports medicine, yet there is a severe lack of empirical data that exists about the topic,” says UW-Madison’s David Bell, an assistant professor with the Department of Kinesiology’s Athletic Training Program and the director of the Wisconsin Injury in Sport Laboratory (WISL). “Physicians are way ahead of the research in this area and, anecdotally, they report that they are seeing more kids in their clinics that have injuries that used to be only found in older athletes.”
In an effort to pull together some much-needed data on the topic, Bell and colleagues from across the UW-Madison campus produced a groundbreaking study that was recently published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine.
