The Gifted

Why're the best athletes so gifted?

I transitioned through sports like most kids do, season to season. I grew up at the rise of specialization of sport– Kids competing in the same sport all year round (if you’re reading as a parent, please do not let your children do this).

By 15 I had made significant improvements in all my sports (puberty probably). I played soccer year-round on top of running cross country in the fall, track in the winter and spring, basketball in the winter, and on top of all of that being a teenage buffoon jumping off of cliffs, playing pick-up football, soccer, and basketball each chance I could. I wouldn’t change that for the WORLD!

Exposure to all these sports provided great health, lifelong friends, and some great opportunities along the way. For the sake of this article, the most important thing it provided me was an athletic foundation. 

Playing lots of sports gave me some great insight in retrospect.

There were always ‘the specialists’-- These kids played club and AAU and went to camps all for one sport. All of their efforts were dedicated to one sport and they were usually so technically skilled that they left other athletes in the dust. This is the soccer player who can’t touch-shoot a basketball without looking like they’ve just had a stroke (or pretty much every wrestler I’ve ever met). These kids have the ability to make it to college and sometimes pro.

Then you had the non-athletic regular people or NARPs for short. These kids never participated in sports in a competitive capacity and it showed. The movement looked slow and choppy and just foreign (because it was). Don’t hate the NARPs though, everyone has their niche.

Then you have the JALTs or the ‘Jack of all trades’ kids. They range from mediocre to pretty good at just about everything and usually change sports each season, maybe they favor one over another or they are simply better at one sport than another. The one’s that are good take them all seriously and generally like competing or have some innate athletic ability. I was a JALT, I was about average or slightly above in everything I did. My experience came from playing different sports and not innate athletic ability. These kids can get to college and sometimes, but rarely pro.

Last and the most dangerous athletes are ‘the gifted’. These kids are the ones everyone else hates. They are as good as the specialist in their sport… but they don’t practice nearly as much AND to top it, they are usually well above average in most things they try. They have athletic ability paired good understanding of movement and how it relates to sports. Maybe the athleticism is made in a gym, but we have all me the kid who just “has it”. These are the kids that go to college and make it to the next level consistently.

This is NOT true for every case mind you– It is a gross generalization of my experiences… However, I am going to list the names of athletes that DOMINATE pro sports and list some secondary sports they dominated below.

Pat Mahomes - Baseball

Tony Gonzales - Basketball

Kyler Murray - Baseball

Ed Reed - Track & Field (Javelin)

Michael Jordan - Baseball

Lev Yashin - Ice Hockey (Imagine being the world’s best goalie in two sports)

Tim Duncan - Swimming

Allen Iverson - Football

Let kids be kids. Letting them experience and experiment with different movements. Different stimuli allow young athletes opportunities to solve problems in real-time! A ‘specialist’ type athlete may develop great technique, but their ability to solve real-time problems is limited by the stimuli of the sport.

The beauty of watching a shortstop at quarterback is the fact that they think and move like a shortstop– they realize that at the end of the day doesn’t matter how it happens, the ball needs to hit the target.

The perfect example here: Pat Mahomes

Mahomes has an incredible ability to problem solve on the fly, paired with his athleticism, and ability to throw on his off-foot, off-hand– Skills that he attributes to his college baseball days. Even Kobe Bryant attributed his footwork to watching European futbol.

Part of the reason that Brazilian soccer is PRAISED worldwide is the ability of players to create and do things NEVER SEEN before… the primary form of soccer or futbol in Brazil, futsal a smaller-scale freestyle soccer game where the field is 1/8th the size of a normal field, forcing players to adapt to the stimuli… move that to a large field, and the abundance of space leaves them with LIMITLESS options.

Long story short… Become a problem solver– Play a variety of sports… and play them often. Become one of ‘the gifted’.