An ecological exploration of sport specialization pathways

Youth sport specialization has been a sustained area of interest in academic and practical settings. Though preliminary findings of the relationship between athletes' pathways of sport participation and their sport outcomes posit early specialization in a single sport as potentially harmful to an athlete's physical and psychological well-being, concern that athletes are specializing earlier, and to a greater degree, than ever before remains pervasive. In analyzing potential explanations for this logical gap between recommendations and perceived behaviors, one notable gap of the literature is the lack of ecological, systems-based research that may better clarify what drives athletes to specialize in a single sport. In this study, a developmental, ecological, perception-based approach was used to explore youth athletes' pathways of sport participation (specifically, why they chose to specialize or play multiple sports) in relation to their ecological characteristics and subsequent sport experiences. To do so, a conceptual, ecological framework was developed to inform the design of this study, and the nature and strength of relationships between variables of this novel heuristic provided an initial understanding of the ecology of sport participation pathways. 132 current high school athletes participated in this study's testing battery, which surveyed elements of their sport participation, personal and contextual characteristics, their sport specialization behaviors and perceptions, and their expectations and subsequent experiences related to their chosen pathway. Results of this study highlighted several significant group differences and relationships between variables, and due to the exploratory nature of this study the non-significant findings also served as a hypothesis-generating mechanism for future research. Implications of these findings were explored in their relation to previous sport specialization literature and the study's guiding theoretical framework (i.e., the Developmental Model of Sport Participation and the Person-Process-Context-Time Ecological Model), and the results underscored the importance of accounting for the influence of context and competitive climate in understanding youth athletes' selected sport pathways and subsequent experiences.