As high school athletics moves into the spring sporting season, it is the time where many athletes find themselves involved in multiple sports for multiple reasons. Whether sports like track and soccer may be primary sports for some athletes they may not be for others, yet regardless the effect of playing multiple sports can only be positive.

From strengthening team chemistry to just simply staying active, there are a plethura of reasons why participating in multiple sports is beneficial. Yet sometimes there are those at the high school level that feel the need to specialize in just one sport.

Just as his entire staff of coaches will state, ACGC activities director Jake Mohling expressed his and his staff’s sentiment on the benefits of multiple sports vs specialization at the high school level.

“We have this idea of specialization in society going around right now and it’s so completely backwards. Unless you’re a D-1 athlete, and even when your a D-1 athlete you still don’t specialize. You look at college football players, 80% of them are multi-sport athletes so to think that focusing your time all on one sport is just completely wrong and nothing supports that idea and so I think it is so important for kids to be playing multiple sports,” explained Mohling.

Coach Mohling also went on to talk about how it affects team chemistry in any sport and encourages everyone to participate in multiple sports.

“Your teammates are out there and you have to spend time with them and you have these kids that say I’m going to work out on my own. You’re not going to get the level of work on your own than you will with a team and a coach pushing you. You’ve got all these people who are going to hold you accountable and that’s going to have a greater effect than your own workout. I push all kids and I think our staff does a very good job of pushing kids to do multiple sports and we get it, you might be going out for a sport just for your teammates and might not be good at it but your out there for your teammates and to get better for other sports. That’s an important thing. A lot of times schools are loosing that and it’s a terrible thing; specialization is bad, it’s bad physically and it’s bad for development and it’s bad for small schools and so we can’t stress enough to our kids to get out there and play multiple sports,” explained Mohling.