It can be a daunting question for most parents when their kid starts to play sports. Are they playing the right sport? Is this going to help them become a better athlete? The answer has become clear!

Many kids play multiple sports while growing up. Usually they will pick one sport to focus on as they go through their high school career. While they are young, it is important for them to experience multiple sports as a chance for their body and mind to explore different challenges. When I was a kid I played soccer, baseball, and basketball. Soccer was my passion and it led me to play throughout college. One of the main reasons I fell in love with the sport was the constant challenging movements my body had to perform during practices and games. There was no long rest periods like in football or baseball. It was continuous synchronous movement with the other players on my team. I noticed that no matter what sport I played, I was always the quickest, most coordinated, most agile, and had the best endurance than the other athletes. This was due to the hard work from soccer, and the athletic skills my body had developed.

Now that I am a professional in developing youth athletes I have discovered the strongest overall athletes play soccer, or have played soccer at one time in their youth. In no other sport will there be so much focus on complete athletic performance for long periods of time. Total body coordination, agility, speed, upper body strength, lower body strength, stamina, and constant mental awareness are all aspects of soccer that can be transferred over into other sports. For a younger athlete, footwork speed, and coordination can be the hardest aspects to improve on for their sport. When a kid plays soccer for a while their body is mechanically forced to improve these athletic qualities. The movement performed during a soccer match causes the athlete to constantly change direction and alter foot placement. Over time their body learns and adapts, getting quicker and improving footwork.

There was a recent article written in The Wall Street Journal describing the benefits of young athletes playing soccer as one of their main sports. Some of the best young players in the NFL credit their amazing agility and speed to playing soccer as well as football when they were kids. These players understand that soccer is a game of constant movement and reaction to these movements. Soccer teaches athletes how to understand the movement of team mates and where they will be before they actually get there. Being light and quick on your feet is also very important in football. The article pointed out that large linemen were running extremely fast for their size. These large men played soccer as kids, learning how to move effectively. Other star athletes that excelled in soccer during their youth are Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, and Chad Ocho Cinco. All of them excelled to become the best athletes in their sport.

So when you start to think about placing your kid in a sport, you definitely want to make sure you aren’t skipping out on soccer!

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