Multisport Athletes All But Obsolete Coaches Pressure Youngsters To Make A Year-Round Commitment To One Sport

The missing boys of summer have been found. They’re being held hostage by fall and winter.

“It just kills me,” says Mike Alberghini, athletic director at Grant High School. “It used to not be unusual for a kid to play three sports. Now, if he does that, he gets hammered from three directions his whole summer.

“He’s got two nights a week in a football passing league, three nights of weightlifting for football, and basketball wants him a couple of nights a week, and then there’s baseball. We’re forcing kids to make choices, and that’s wrong.”

The two-sport high school athlete? A dwindling breed. The three-sport athlete? A fool, at least by today’s thinking. More high school coaches want a 12-month commitment.

Days that once were given to a second or third sport are now devoured by a swarm of conditioning regimens, developmental leagues and instructional camps.

The multisport star can feel an implicating finger thumping him right in the chest of his letter jacket: Choose or fall behind.

“Everybody seems like they want to stick with one sport now,” said former Florin High School pitcher Daryl Grant, whose own single-mindedness landed him a partial scholarship to Long Beach State.

He is a glaring exception, for baseball is being soundly routed in the race for a young athlete’s undivided attention. Basketball and football are the glamour options here.

“I don’t know, it’s like everybody wants to play basketball,” said Grant High outfielder Armahd Baber. “There’s more publicity around basketball. Michael Jordan - everybody wants to be like him.”

Of course, Jordan played baseball, too. So did former All-Star NBA guard Kevin Johnson, who played at Sacramento High School in the early 1980s. In fact, Johnson was drafted by the Oakland A’s and played a couple of games at Class A Modesto before moving on to his collegiate basketball career at Cal.

Had they grown up in the ‘90s, Jordan and Johnson might never have set foot on a high school baseball field. Had Jordan felt compelled to specialize in one sport after being cut from his freshman basketball team, he might have played only baseball.

“At one time, coaches took sports for what it is,” Alberghini said. “It’s an extension of the day for kids. But now you’ve got coaches coming in who are selfish. They think only about their sport.

“You hear coaches telling their kids that, to make the team and have a chance at a scholarship, they’ve got to commit to this year-round deal. Listen, for the amount of kids who ever get a scholarship, the amount of kids who ever even get a sniff of being a pro athlete, that’s just not worth it.”

The numbers suggest Alberghini is right.

According to data compiled by the Northeastern University Center for the Study of Sport in Society, only 1 in 1,000 high school basketball players will earn a college scholarship. Only 1 in 10,000 will play any form of professional basketball. And only 1 in 50,000 will actually make it to the NBA, even for a day.

When Steve Williams coached basketball at Grant in the 1980s, he and Alberghini - then the baseball coach - would frequently funnel athletes to one another. These days, Williams looks over his summer basketball camps at Sly Park and sees ample evidence of the new mentality.

“Kids are having to declare what their sport is at an early age,” Williams said. “They can’t just dabble with basketball, or they’ll get left behind by the kids that play year-round. A lot of good baseball players have given it up to go play AAU and organized summer basketball.”

For years now, Valley High School has enforced a policy that prohibits coaches from continuing their programs out of season. Spring football, winter baseball, organized weightlifting regimens - Valley allows none of it, all in the interest of encouraging young athletes to develop other sports skills and interests.

“A lot of people look down on us for that; they say that’s why we’re suffering in some sports,” said Valley athletic director Frank Santangelo. “We’ve had some coaches quit. They’ve said, ‘We just can’t compete unless we go year-round,’ and they’re out of here.”