A football helmet lies on the ground while members of the Floral Park High School football team are in the background practicing for the 2015 season, on the morning of August 19, 2015.(Photo by Thomas A.
Ferrara/Newsday via Getty Images) A research team recently set out to understand why high school athletes specialize in a single sport, and more specifically, wanted to understand the role of athlete competitiveness in the decision to specialize.
Former research has shown that repetitive sport specialization can lead to injury and burnout, and while this may still be the case, this new study, published in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, recognizes that it’s likely more nuanced than that.
The researchers surveyed 975 U.S. high school athletes and found two dimensions of competitiveness — the enjoyment of competition which has been associated with intrinsic sport motivation and good sportsmanship, along with contentious competitiveness which has been associated with extrinsic sport motivation and poor sportsmanship.RELATED: Youth tackle football: Americans differ on whether kids should play, survey finds"Our research suggests that the story isn’t so much that specialization is bad, but that specialization can have negative outcomes," Dee Warmath, a co-author of the study, told FOX Television Stations. "We found that high school athletes seem to be more likely to specialize for positive reasons – the enjoyment of competition and wanting to be better at their chosen sport." Thousands of football fans in Kansas City pitched in to help R&B singer Ashanti belt out the national anthem after technical issues rendered her inaudible ahead of the Cincinnati Bengals versus Kansas City Chiefs AFC Championship on Jan.