7 ms·

The threat of youth basketball

57 points by bkohlmann 7y ago

sandworm101 7y ago
>> the growing tendency for parents and kids to focus on one sport, year-round, to the exclusion of all others. >> But while the upsides of specialization are unclear, there are few doubts about the downsides. What doubts? Winning. To be the best, and being the best is all that matters these days, you must focus on only one sport. For me it was swimming. To compete at the national level you have to train all year, 20+ hours a week. And to actually win at the national level you have to sub-specialize into particular events, specific stroke/distance combinations. Sure, some stars can win at everything, but the majority of swimmers focus. There aren't many champion 50m sprinters who can also medal in 400/800 IMs, not in the last decade or two. So perhaps the NBA should stop taking only the best basketball players. Perhaps they should look at people who are not literally 'the best' and look at people who are well-rounded and therefor less likely to be injured in their first pro year. But that doesn't win championships. Professional players are essentially actors on a stage for an audience. They are tools for teams, businesses that will be around long after any individual players are injured/retired. What turns the most profit (winning) isn't necessarily what is best for the human players.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  >Professional players are essentially actors on a stage for an audience. They are tools for teams, businesses that will be around long after any individual players are injured/retired. Absolutely. It shocks me how many people buy up the “our” team stuff and don’t realize that a lot of the narrative around interviews and sports-talk and drama are just advertising campaigns. This is big business. But to the topic; You’re right, if it’s really about winning it has to be one sport and be one section inside that. It shouldn’t be about winning national championships for kids, because millions will try for the spots a couple hundred will fill, but that’s not really any of my concern I guess.
  - asark 7y ago
    > It shocks me how many people buy up the “our” team stuff and don’t realize that a lot of the narrative around interviews and sports-talk and drama are just advertising campaigns. I get sports fandom that's fundamentally arbitrary and/or fictional. I mean that's been with us since at least Rome, and probably before. Happens naturally on the school yard, even. I'll gladly join in. It's fun. What I don't get is pro sports fans who don't seem to be "in on the joke", the way, say, your average pro wrestling fan is "in on the joke", so far as the framing narrative of their sport and team being fiction. The kind who will get actually-mad over the stuff, or start fights and spend the night in jail over it. But maybe they're just way better at maintaining kayfabe.
    - paganel 7y ago
      > But maybe they're just way better at maintaining kayfabe. Violence in sports 100% sucks, but I can pretty much say that most of these people do not see it as a joke. Talking about history, here's one very famous and pretty old sports-related rivalry that was not a joke at all, as tens of thousands of people ended up dying [1]: > The Nika riots, or Nika revolt, took place against Emperor Justinian I in Constantinople over the course of a week in 532 AD. They were the most violent riots in the city's history, with nearly half of Constantinople being burned or destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed. (...) There were initially four major factional teams of chariot racing, differentiated by the colour of the uniform in which they competed; the colours were also worn by their supporters. These were the Blues, the Greens, the Reds, and the Whites, although by the Byzantine era the only teams with any influence were the Blues and Greens. Emperor Justinian I was a supporter of the Blues. On a more optimistic note sports supporting done right can absolutely give some sort of purpose to one's life (I know these are big words, but that's how I see things), for example if you look at these Aris Thessaloniki supporters chanting and supporting their (basketball) team [2] it's almost impossible not to get hyped up. Or these San Lorenzo fans [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcvAOpnnMK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcvAOpnnMK0 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9RMPBoTAVE&feature=youtu.be&t=16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9RMPBoTAVE&feature=youtu.be...
- jessaustin 7y ago
  This is what the grinders tell themselves. They still get beaten regularly (not all the time) by those with superior native talent. Those people don't focus as you suggest, and they still win. The NFL MVP last year could certainly have been an MLB MVP, had he chosen to go that way. When he quit college baseball, he was told by pro baseball players (e.g. A-Rod) that he was "wasting his baseball talent". Patrick Mahomes was born with a lot of native talent, so his time spent playing baseball didn't hurt him... It's fine to play sports, but only so long as it's fun. If it ain't fun, you don't have enough native talent for it, and you're wasting your time. (This isn't the case for other competitions that don't attract so many competitors. In those cases, sure, grind if you want.)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - elgenie 7y ago
    Mahomes was a third/fourth round draft type out of high school and the MLB draft is a loooong way away from even making it for a single day in the majors. Claiming that he could “certainly” be an MLB MVP is ludicrous.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      The baseball draft is somewhat clueless; that's why they have 40 rounds rather than two or seven like a sport that has any idea at all about who's going to succeed. Yeah there were probably about a hundred guys standing in line in front of Mahomes for eventual MVP status. (He sort of jumped the line on the football side, winning in the first year he started.) Still, that's a lot closer than thousands of baseball grinders will ever get. He certainly had a chance. Reading is fundamental.
      - elgenie 7y ago
        If "certainly had a chance" means "played baseball and was an OK prospect", sure, but then you're not saying much of anything. The truth is that it's a lot closer to five thousand guys, a shoulder, and an elbow between a third/fourth round high school pitcher and an "eventual MVP". Take a look at the third rounds of 2010 [1], 2011 [2], 2012 [3] drafts, which are fairly representative: only ~40% have made the majors at all, and there's one All-Star reliever (zero chance at MVP) and one reserve All-Star catcher (with zero MVP votes in his career) of the lot. There are 750 active MLBers at any one time and the odds are 60-40 against a third/fourth round high school pitcher, the riskiest kind of prospect, joining them. And of the 58 league MVPs awarded since 1990, exactly three have gone to pitchers. [1] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year_ID=2010&draft_type=junreg&query_type=year_round https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year... [2] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year_ID=2011draft_type=junreg&query_type=year_round https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year... [3] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year_ID=2012&draft_type=junreg&query_type=year_round https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year...
- elgenie 7y ago
  Swimming’s not really analogous to the NBA because the peak comes so early (for example, Phelps was an Olympian as a high school sophomore); women’s gymnastics is the same. Swimming is also a low joint-impact no-contact sport with no sudden unpredicted movements. The point from the NBA’s perspective is not that the US players who are not specializing are better prospects, but that the guys who eventually do develop the running and jumping ability good enough for the NBA would have been better off not specializing until a much later age. In this case, the NBA’s interests in rookie health and long careers for stars are well aligned with those of the players but not aligned with those of AAU coaches and/or parents trying to get a college scholarship.
  - sandworm101 7y ago
    >> because the peak comes so early (for example, Phelps was an Olympian as a high school sophomore); The youth trend in swimming is an aberration. New training methodologies developed recently that focus on technique/stoke rather than athletic ability. These techniques work well enough that they have become a commodity. Parents can buy a good coach for their kid, turning them into an olympian in a handful of years. That will change with time. As these techniques become more widespread, as the kids with the new stroke grow up, the ages will rise. It isn't like gymnastics where body movements and dimensions are so vital. Swimming is literally the slowest sport. The kids don't have that much of an advantage.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      Are they only going to teach "the new stroke" to one cohort of kids? Why wouldn't old new-strokers lose to young new-strokers? How much money have you spent on swimming instruction?
      - watwut 7y ago
        > Why wouldn't old new-strokers lose to young new-strokers? Possibly because old are still stronger. The old are not 40 years old, they are like 20 something years old.
      - 7y ago
- Firadeoclus 7y ago
  Coincidentally, a point of view against the supposed benefits of early and narrow specialisation: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/12/generalise-dont-specialise-why-focusing-too-narrowly-is-bad-for-us https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/12/general...
  - Balgair 7y ago
    I'm going through Epstein's book now and with basketball and other team sports, I feel that he is correct. The late bloomers stand a better chance than the early specalizers. Epstein makes the point that the world need both types of people, but that early specalizers are a little too 'en vogue' right now. He points out that in games like golf and chess, where the objectives and next steps are very clear and where the information in the activity is minimally hidden, being an early specalizer is a good thing to bet on. In other games and sports like tennis and poker, where the objectives and next steps are not clear and where information is hidden and not accessible, then going through a sampling period and then deciding is a better method. Obviously the world is mix of those things among many others. In basketball, I'd argue that the sport is not clear and the information is hidden. Practicing shots is essential, but the inter-person play and the mental gamesmenship is a feature of the sport. It's the bluffing, the flopping, the timming, the brinksmanship that make elite basketball a great sport to watch. Information about specific plays is hidden, the next move to make is about juking and fooling people, and the team aspect makes coordinating many high level players nearly impossible. As such, players that have a lot of other experience besides just shooting field goals really well, will do better. You still have to be very good at basketball, of course. But trying out a few sports, cross-training not just the body but also the mind, and developing other neural pathways is essential for elite players.
- mruts 7y ago
  Check out the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein for why generalists actually have better outcomes than specialists, even at specialized tasks. Intuitively, I think this makes sense. Imagine skill as a logarithmic function with the x axis being time. Every unit of work you put in to train starts becoming less and less efficient. By training in different skills you are making more efficient use of your training time. And even if the skills appear to be orthogonal to see each, there’s definitely a cross training effect, for both mental and physical tasks. A good example is programming. For longer than I care to admit I was one of those guys who could code but wasn’t that strong in math. I was frustrated because it felt like I wasn’t getting better. I decided to strongly focus on math, started exercising, and did brain training with dual n-back tests to increase my fluid intelligence. I was pleasantly surprised that all these unrelated activities boosted my programming ability to a significant degree, in a comparatively marginal amount of time.
WalterBright 7y ago
I recall reading about some archaeologists who studied the bones of early American colonists. Their skeletons all showed signs of extreme, sustained stress. They basically worked themselves to death and died young.
- mruts 7y ago
  Founder’s effects are really interesting. One might hypothesis that this led to the descendants of these colonists to have stronger bones. You see this effect in many populations that originated from few individuals. A good example is Polynesians, who nowadays have massive obesity problems. The advantage that let these founders survive and reproduce is same that hurts them today (low metabolism, efficient calorie usage, etc).
ErikAugust 7y ago
I have a hunch it has to do with the sort of fast twitch athleticism that is required by the NBA combined with the volume that even young people play competitively. There was a study of a soccer club leagues in Europe. They found the higher in competition you go, the slower twitch the players were. Why? Probably because they could simply play more without injury, even though faster twitch should provide an advantage in speed, etc. Instead though, faster twitch athletes can’t handle the work load and become injured. One suggestion would be to measure this, and tailor the training load individually. Many athletes would benefit from less training because that is how they are built.
quibbler 7y ago
Unclear from the article how to prevent those injuries? I thought modern sports already tries to cover all the bases, so people also do supplementary strength training, for example. Maybe the issue is not specialization, but too much sports in general?
darkpuma 7y ago
The problem is not year-round participation in sports; the problems are specific to the sports themselves. Swimming year-round is very common and the only thing likely to get harmed is the health of your hair. That's because swimming is a low impact holistic exercise (at least for the majority, who are swimming at a state level at best); basketball on the other hand is high impact and is going to inherently have more of these problems, particularly without recuperation periods. Even if a swimmer overspecializes and overtrains without break for years, they are unlikely to cripple themselves because the sport simply isn't dangerous in that way.
axilmar 7y ago
> You get a sophomore that can do a 360-degree dunk whereas 20 years ago you never saw that Well, not true of course. I've been playing basketball my whole life, and I've seen 15 year olds jumping from the free throw line, doing windmills and double pump reverse dunks not only 20 years ago, but 30 years ago. And all of them were white, since I live in Europe. Do we really expect children of today to not become the fragile adults of tomorrow, when children rarely go out and play? when we were young, we were out for the better part of the day, playing, running, jumping, lifting, you name it. And the generation before us were even more physical, doing lots of work outside. And from these generations came out the super athletes that we all know and love today.
- MaconBacon 7y ago
  360 dunk is very different than a double pump or windmill. Spud Webb was doing a double pump 30 years ago... I think you are looking through rose colored glasses if you believe there was a glut of 14 year old European dudes with the hops for 360 dunks in 1989...

57 points by bkohlmann 7y ago

>> the growing tendency for parents and kids to focus on one sport, year-round, to the exclusion of all others. >> But while the upsides of specialization are unclear, there are few doubts about the downsides. What doubts? Winning. To be the best, and being the best is all that matters these days, you must focus on only one sport. For me it was swimming. To compete at the national level you have to train all year, 20+ hours a week. And to actually win at the national level you have to sub-specialize into particular events, specific stroke/distance combinations. Sure, some stars can win at everything, but the majority of swimmers focus. There aren't many champion 50m sprinters who can also medal in 400/800 IMs, not in the last decade or two. So perhaps the NBA should stop taking only the best basketball players. Perhaps they should look at people who are not literally 'the best' and look at people who are well-rounded and therefor less likely to be injured in their first pro year. But that doesn't win championships. Professional players are essentially actors on a stage for an audience. They are tools for teams, businesses that will be around long after any individual players are injured/retired. What turns the most profit (winning) isn't necessarily what is best for the human players.

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
>Professional players are essentially actors on a stage for an audience. They are tools for teams, businesses that will be around long after any individual players are injured/retired. Absolutely. It shocks me how many people buy up the “our” team stuff and don’t realize that a lot of the narrative around interviews and sports-talk and drama are just advertising campaigns. This is big business. But to the topic; You’re right, if it’s really about winning it has to be one sport and be one section inside that. It shouldn’t be about winning national championships for kids, because millions will try for the spots a couple hundred will fill, but that’s not really any of my concern I guess.
- asark 7y ago
  > It shocks me how many people buy up the “our” team stuff and don’t realize that a lot of the narrative around interviews and sports-talk and drama are just advertising campaigns. I get sports fandom that's fundamentally arbitrary and/or fictional. I mean that's been with us since at least Rome, and probably before. Happens naturally on the school yard, even. I'll gladly join in. It's fun. What I don't get is pro sports fans who don't seem to be "in on the joke", the way, say, your average pro wrestling fan is "in on the joke", so far as the framing narrative of their sport and team being fiction. The kind who will get actually-mad over the stuff, or start fights and spend the night in jail over it. But maybe they're just way better at maintaining kayfabe.
  - paganel 7y ago
    > But maybe they're just way better at maintaining kayfabe. Violence in sports 100% sucks, but I can pretty much say that most of these people do not see it as a joke. Talking about history, here's one very famous and pretty old sports-related rivalry that was not a joke at all, as tens of thousands of people ended up dying [1]: > The Nika riots, or Nika revolt, took place against Emperor Justinian I in Constantinople over the course of a week in 532 AD. They were the most violent riots in the city's history, with nearly half of Constantinople being burned or destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed. (...) There were initially four major factional teams of chariot racing, differentiated by the colour of the uniform in which they competed; the colours were also worn by their supporters. These were the Blues, the Greens, the Reds, and the Whites, although by the Byzantine era the only teams with any influence were the Blues and Greens. Emperor Justinian I was a supporter of the Blues. On a more optimistic note sports supporting done right can absolutely give some sort of purpose to one's life (I know these are big words, but that's how I see things), for example if you look at these Aris Thessaloniki supporters chanting and supporting their (basketball) team [2] it's almost impossible not to get hyped up. Or these San Lorenzo fans [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcvAOpnnMK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcvAOpnnMK0 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9RMPBoTAVE&feature=youtu.be&t=16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9RMPBoTAVE&feature=youtu.be...
jessaustin 7y ago
This is what the grinders tell themselves. They still get beaten regularly (not all the time) by those with superior native talent. Those people don't focus as you suggest, and they still win. The NFL MVP last year could certainly have been an MLB MVP, had he chosen to go that way. When he quit college baseball, he was told by pro baseball players (e.g. A-Rod) that he was "wasting his baseball talent". Patrick Mahomes was born with a lot of native talent, so his time spent playing baseball didn't hurt him... It's fine to play sports, but only so long as it's fun. If it ain't fun, you don't have enough native talent for it, and you're wasting your time. (This isn't the case for other competitions that don't attract so many competitors. In those cases, sure, grind if you want.)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- elgenie 7y ago
  Mahomes was a third/fourth round draft type out of high school and the MLB draft is a loooong way away from even making it for a single day in the majors. Claiming that he could “certainly” be an MLB MVP is ludicrous.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    The baseball draft is somewhat clueless; that's why they have 40 rounds rather than two or seven like a sport that has any idea at all about who's going to succeed. Yeah there were probably about a hundred guys standing in line in front of Mahomes for eventual MVP status. (He sort of jumped the line on the football side, winning in the first year he started.) Still, that's a lot closer than thousands of baseball grinders will ever get. He certainly had a chance. Reading is fundamental.
    - elgenie 7y ago
      If "certainly had a chance" means "played baseball and was an OK prospect", sure, but then you're not saying much of anything. The truth is that it's a lot closer to five thousand guys, a shoulder, and an elbow between a third/fourth round high school pitcher and an "eventual MVP". Take a look at the third rounds of 2010 [1], 2011 [2], 2012 [3] drafts, which are fairly representative: only ~40% have made the majors at all, and there's one All-Star reliever (zero chance at MVP) and one reserve All-Star catcher (with zero MVP votes in his career) of the lot. There are 750 active MLBers at any one time and the odds are 60-40 against a third/fourth round high school pitcher, the riskiest kind of prospect, joining them. And of the 58 league MVPs awarded since 1990, exactly three have gone to pitchers. [1] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year_ID=2010&draft_type=junreg&query_type=year_round https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year... [2] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year_ID=2011draft_type=junreg&query_type=year_round https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year... [3] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year_ID=2012&draft_type=junreg&query_type=year_round https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year...
elgenie 7y ago
Swimming’s not really analogous to the NBA because the peak comes so early (for example, Phelps was an Olympian as a high school sophomore); women’s gymnastics is the same. Swimming is also a low joint-impact no-contact sport with no sudden unpredicted movements. The point from the NBA’s perspective is not that the US players who are not specializing are better prospects, but that the guys who eventually do develop the running and jumping ability good enough for the NBA would have been better off not specializing until a much later age. In this case, the NBA’s interests in rookie health and long careers for stars are well aligned with those of the players but not aligned with those of AAU coaches and/or parents trying to get a college scholarship.
- sandworm101 7y ago
  >> because the peak comes so early (for example, Phelps was an Olympian as a high school sophomore); The youth trend in swimming is an aberration. New training methodologies developed recently that focus on technique/stoke rather than athletic ability. These techniques work well enough that they have become a commodity. Parents can buy a good coach for their kid, turning them into an olympian in a handful of years. That will change with time. As these techniques become more widespread, as the kids with the new stroke grow up, the ages will rise. It isn't like gymnastics where body movements and dimensions are so vital. Swimming is literally the slowest sport. The kids don't have that much of an advantage.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    Are they only going to teach "the new stroke" to one cohort of kids? Why wouldn't old new-strokers lose to young new-strokers? How much money have you spent on swimming instruction?
    - watwut 7y ago
      > Why wouldn't old new-strokers lose to young new-strokers? Possibly because old are still stronger. The old are not 40 years old, they are like 20 something years old.
    - 7y ago
Firadeoclus 7y ago
Coincidentally, a point of view against the supposed benefits of early and narrow specialisation: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/12/generalise-dont-specialise-why-focusing-too-narrowly-is-bad-for-us https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/12/general...
- Balgair 7y ago
  I'm going through Epstein's book now and with basketball and other team sports, I feel that he is correct. The late bloomers stand a better chance than the early specalizers. Epstein makes the point that the world need both types of people, but that early specalizers are a little too 'en vogue' right now. He points out that in games like golf and chess, where the objectives and next steps are very clear and where the information in the activity is minimally hidden, being an early specalizer is a good thing to bet on. In other games and sports like tennis and poker, where the objectives and next steps are not clear and where information is hidden and not accessible, then going through a sampling period and then deciding is a better method. Obviously the world is mix of those things among many others. In basketball, I'd argue that the sport is not clear and the information is hidden. Practicing shots is essential, but the inter-person play and the mental gamesmenship is a feature of the sport. It's the bluffing, the flopping, the timming, the brinksmanship that make elite basketball a great sport to watch. Information about specific plays is hidden, the next move to make is about juking and fooling people, and the team aspect makes coordinating many high level players nearly impossible. As such, players that have a lot of other experience besides just shooting field goals really well, will do better. You still have to be very good at basketball, of course. But trying out a few sports, cross-training not just the body but also the mind, and developing other neural pathways is essential for elite players.
mruts 7y ago
Check out the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein for why generalists actually have better outcomes than specialists, even at specialized tasks. Intuitively, I think this makes sense. Imagine skill as a logarithmic function with the x axis being time. Every unit of work you put in to train starts becoming less and less efficient. By training in different skills you are making more efficient use of your training time. And even if the skills appear to be orthogonal to see each, there’s definitely a cross training effect, for both mental and physical tasks. A good example is programming. For longer than I care to admit I was one of those guys who could code but wasn’t that strong in math. I was frustrated because it felt like I wasn’t getting better. I decided to strongly focus on math, started exercising, and did brain training with dual n-back tests to increase my fluid intelligence. I was pleasantly surprised that all these unrelated activities boosted my programming ability to a significant degree, in a comparatively marginal amount of time.

WalterBright 7y ago

I recall reading about some archaeologists who studied the bones of early American colonists. Their skeletons all showed signs of extreme, sustained stress. They basically worked themselves to death and died young.

mruts 7y ago
Founder’s effects are really interesting. One might hypothesis that this led to the descendants of these colonists to have stronger bones. You see this effect in many populations that originated from few individuals. A good example is Polynesians, who nowadays have massive obesity problems. The advantage that let these founders survive and reproduce is same that hurts them today (low metabolism, efficient calorie usage, etc).

ErikAugust 7y ago

I have a hunch it has to do with the sort of fast twitch athleticism that is required by the NBA combined with the volume that even young people play competitively. There was a study of a soccer club leagues in Europe. They found the higher in competition you go, the slower twitch the players were. Why? Probably because they could simply play more without injury, even though faster twitch should provide an advantage in speed, etc. Instead though, faster twitch athletes can’t handle the work load and become injured. One suggestion would be to measure this, and tailor the training load individually. Many athletes would benefit from less training because that is how they are built.

quibbler 7y ago

Unclear from the article how to prevent those injuries? I thought modern sports already tries to cover all the bases, so people also do supplementary strength training, for example. Maybe the issue is not specialization, but too much sports in general?

darkpuma 7y ago

The problem is not year-round participation in sports; the problems are specific to the sports themselves. Swimming year-round is very common and the only thing likely to get harmed is the health of your hair. That's because swimming is a low impact holistic exercise (at least for the majority, who are swimming at a state level at best); basketball on the other hand is high impact and is going to inherently have more of these problems, particularly without recuperation periods. Even if a swimmer overspecializes and overtrains without break for years, they are unlikely to cripple themselves because the sport simply isn't dangerous in that way.

axilmar 7y ago

> You get a sophomore that can do a 360-degree dunk whereas 20 years ago you never saw that Well, not true of course. I've been playing basketball my whole life, and I've seen 15 year olds jumping from the free throw line, doing windmills and double pump reverse dunks not only 20 years ago, but 30 years ago. And all of them were white, since I live in Europe. Do we really expect children of today to not become the fragile adults of tomorrow, when children rarely go out and play? when we were young, we were out for the better part of the day, playing, running, jumping, lifting, you name it. And the generation before us were even more physical, doing lots of work outside. And from these generations came out the super athletes that we all know and love today.

MaconBacon 7y ago
360 dunk is very different than a double pump or windmill. Spud Webb was doing a double pump 30 years ago... I think you are looking through rose colored glasses if you believe there was a glut of 14 year old European dudes with the hops for 360 dunks in 1989...