Evaluating a Commonly Used Tool for Measuring Sport Specialization in Young Athletes.

contextSport specialization has been defined as year-round intensive training in a single sport to the exclusion of other sports. A commonly used survey tool created by Jayanthi et al, which classifies athletes as having a low, moderate, or high level of specialization, categorizes only athletes answering

objectiveTo determine the proportion of athletes misclassified as moderately rather than highly specialized because they never played a previous sport.

designCross-sectional study.

settingHospital-based pediatric outpatient sports medicine clinic. PATIENTS OR OTHER

participantsInjured athletes aged 12 to 17 years who presented to the clinic between 2015 and 2017 and completed a sports-participation survey (n = 917). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S): Sport-specialization level.

resultsOf 917 participants, 299 (32.6%) played a single sport more than 8 months per year, and 208/299 (69.6%) had previously quit other sports (highly specialized), whereas 91 (30.4%) had never played other sports (highly specialized and misclassified as moderate). Individual-sport athletes had a 2.03 times greater risk of being highly specialized and misclassified as moderate than team-sport athletes (relative risk = 2.03 [95% confidence interval = 1.37, 3.00]). Females had a 1.70 times greater risk of being misclassified as moderately specialized than males (relative risk 1.70 [95% confidence interval = 1.07, 2.70]). Of the 3 sports with the largest number of athletes, artistic gymnastics had the highest proportion (51.2%) who had never played other sports.

conclusionsThe commonly used specialization survey misclassified a substantial number of highly specialized athletes as moderately specialized. Researchers should consider adding a fourth survey question, "Have you only ever played 1 sport?" to identify and better study this unique subset of misclassified athletes.