What Sport Should My Kid Start With?

One of the questions I get from parents fairly often is, “What should my kid get started in?”

If they're talking about a young kid, my answer is usually pretty simple: gymnastics, wrestling, and a team sport. Then I tell them to let the kid play.

Usually they're looking for the sport that will give their child the greatest athletic advantage, or maybe they're already thinking about what sport the kid might eventually specialize in. I understand that instinct. Parents want to give their kids every opportunity they can. But I don't think the goal when a child is young should be to figure out exactly what sport they're going to be good at. I think the goal should be to give them a broad range of athletic experiences, let them develop a wide movement vocabulary, and give them enough freedom to discover what they actually enjoy.

That's why I like gymnastics, wrestling, and a team sport. They expose a kid to very different physical problems.

Gymnastics teaches body awareness, balance, coordination, spatial orientation, strength, jumping, landing, rolling and controlling the body through positions that aren't necessarily part of everyday movement.

Wrestling adds another human being to the equation. Now the child has to maintain balance while somebody else is actively trying to take it away, learn leverage and positioning, deal with physical contact, and solve problems against resistance.

A team sport brings another set of experiences: running, changing direction, throwing, catching, reacting to other people, communicating, cooperating and learning how to function as part of something larger than yourself.

I don't expect one of those activities to provide everything a young athlete needs. I like them precisely because they're different.

Build the Athlete Before the Specialist

I'm not particularly interested in deciding what a six-year-old is going to be when they grow up. At that age, I would much rather see a kid become comfortable moving than become highly specialized at one particular movement. I want them to run, jump, climb, roll, fall, balance, throw, catch, wrestle, chase and evade. I want them to experience competition, but I also want them to have plenty of time when nobody is keeping score. I want them to learn how to listen to a coach, but I also want them to have enough unstructured play that they have to figure things out for themselves. Every one of those experiences adds something to the athlete.

That's what I mean when I talk about developing a broad athletic base. We're essentially building a vocabulary. A child who has spent years learning gymnastics has developed a different understanding of balance and body control. A child who has wrestled has learned what it feels like to make physical decisions against another person who is actively resisting. A child who has played soccer has learned to move through space while tracking teammates, opponents and a ball. Those experiences don't disappear when the child eventually chooses another sport. They become part of the athlete. When specialization eventually happens, the athlete brings all of that previous experience with them.

I think we sometimes get too focused on identifying a child's sport instead of developing the child. Parents will ask me what sport their kid should do because they're already thinking about the eventual outcome. Maybe they're wondering whether wrestling will help with football, or whether gymnastics will help with another sport, or whether they should start a martial art because their child seems physically talented. Those are reasonable questions, but I think they're getting ahead of themselves. A young kid doesn't need to have their athletic future figured out. They need opportunities to move, explore, compete, fail, succeed and discover what they like.

Let Them Play

And that's the other part of my answer that I think is just as important as gymnastics, wrestling and team sports: "let them play."

That sounds obvious, but sometimes we get so focused on developing athletic ability that we forget we're talking about children. Not every minute of a child's physical development needs to be structured, measured and coached. There is tremendous value in a kid running around the neighborhood, climbing something they probably shouldn't climb, making up a game with their friends, chasing somebody around the yard, riding a bike, falling down and getting back up. They're solving movement problems without anybody giving them a drill or explaining the optimal technique. They're developing physical confidence and learning what their bodies can do.

I don't think childhood needs to become an athletic development program. We don't need to optimize every minute of it. If a kid spends two hours playing outside and never performs a single formally prescribed exercise, I don't consider that wasted training time. In many cases, I think it's exactly what they need. Organized sports can provide experiences that free play can't, but free play can provide experiences that organized sports often take away. The child gets to make the decisions, change the rules, try something stupid, fail, try again and figure out what works.

And maybe most importantly, they get to have fun.

That matters more than some parents realize. If your kid loves wrestling, great. Let them wrestle. If they love gymnastics, great. Let them do gymnastics. If they discover that they love soccer and want to play every afternoon with their friends, that's great too. If they hate one of those activities, I don't think the answer is necessarily to convince them that they're wrong. The point isn't to manufacture the next Olympic athlete at seven years old. The point is to develop a kid who enjoys moving, feels comfortable in their body, and wants to continue being active as they get older.

Let the Kid Show You Who They Are

One of the biggest mistakes I think parents can make is deciding what their child should become before the child has had enough experiences to figure that out for themselves. Maybe you think your kid is going to be a baseball player and they discover wrestling. Maybe you think they're going to be a soccer player and they fall in love with gymnastics. Maybe you think they're going to be a fighter and they discover that what they really love is swimming. That's okay. In fact, that's the whole point of giving them a variety of experiences in the first place.

I've always thought that one of our jobs as coaches and parents is to create opportunities and then pay attention to what the child does with them. You don't necessarily have to determine the destination. Sometimes you just need to provide enough different roads for the kid to discover which one they want to take. We can expose them to competition without making competition the center of their identity. We can teach discipline without turning every practice into a test. We can encourage them to work hard without making them believe that every activity has to produce some measurable achievement.

Eventually, some kids will tell you exactly what they want to do. They'll want to wrestle every day. They'll want to play soccer. They'll want to do gymnastics. They'll want to do all of it. That's when you can start following their interests more seriously. If they develop a real passion for something, there's plenty of time to increase the training and eventually specialize. But I don't think we need to rush that process.

When parents ask me what sport their young kid should start with, I don't really think they're asking the most important question. I'd rather ask what experiences we can give that child.

• Can we help them become comfortable moving?

• Can we expose them to different kinds of movement and different kinds of problems?

• Can we teach them how to fall, how to compete, how to cooperate and how to keep trying when something doesn't work?

• Can we give them enough freedom to discover what they enjoy?

If we can do those things, I don't think it matters very much whether that kid eventually becomes a wrestler, soccer player, gymnast, football player, martial artist or something else entirely. We've already accomplished something important. We've built an young athlete.

And then we can let them decide what they want to become.