Years ago, I had the opportunity to speak with an Olympic athlete. She earned 12 varsity letters throughout her highly decorated high school career as a multi-sport athlete and then proceeded to win two conference championships in her main collegiate sport. She was also voted a three-year captain of her college team, which is beyond rare. And all of this happened before she became an Olympian.
I asked her many questions throughout our conversation, but one of the most memorable was when I asked why she continued to play all three sports in high school when she was already committed to play her top sport at the collegiate level. At her age, many athletes stopped playing multiple sports once they committed to college, or they focused solely on one sport to maximize skills and earn a college roster spot. She explained that she learned the most about herself when she played the other two sports — the sports she was good at, but not great.
That hit me.
There I was, chatting with an Olympian who is living the dream of so many youth athletes— the sacrifice, the success, the endless pursuit of improvement. But she learned the most when she struggled. She intentionally chose the harder path, even when there was an easy and understandable out, because she discovered more about herself through the feeling of being less talented than her teammates.
I loved this answer for many reasons. So often in life we gravitate toward what we succeed in or what comes naturally to us. That’s human nature. Why struggle if we don’t have to? Give me the happy endorphins!
We’ve heard it before: we need to feel discomfort to grow. But discomfort is hard on several levels, especially for athletes who have a scoreboard to measure performance.
It starts with ego. We want to be good at things. We don’t want to be bad at things. Society tells us people look at us, talk about us, or judge us when we struggle. So we show the world the things we do well instead of exposing the places where we are still learning or unable to find success.
We commonly hear that sport is a great teacher. That children learn some of life’s most important lessons through competition. We say sports build resilience and creativity and provide an arena for growth. But children only experience those benefits when they are allowed to explore and fail — to try again in different environments with different challenges. Resilience is rarely built inside a single, controlled space where we are comfortable and relatively certain about the outcome.
Instead of asking what happened to the three-sport athlete, perhaps the better question is this: what do children lose when they miss the multi-sport experience?
They may lose the chance to discover new strengths or be a true beginner. Or they may lose the humility that forms when comparison creeps in and stares you down.
Multi-sport participation once created natural transitions for youth athletes. One sport ended, another began, and with it came new teammates and problems to solve. Athletes learned how to adjust to a new coach and a different role without realizing it. And they learned that struggle in one space gave them an opportunity to thrive in another.
When those openings disappear, the sport experience narrows. Pressure arrives earlier for athletes, and the focus becomes getting it right instead of building the skills. The very environment meant to create resilience can slowly begin to limit it.
The Olympic athlete I spoke with understood something transformative at a young age: growth often lives just outside the places where we feel most comfortable. She didn’t continue playing three sports because it was easy or expected. She did it because those other experiences revealed parts of herself she could not access anywhere else.
Maybe the real loss isn’t the disappearance of the three-sport athlete and how that affects the overarching business and experience of sport. Perhaps the true loss is the fading opportunity for exploration and discovery as essential components of childhood.
Carry on.
Jess Lapachinski is an athletic administrator and sport performance professional who lives in the Pioneer Valley. Jess can be reached at jl.victoryLap@gmail.com.