After a long football season ends at Park, many people think the season is over for players like me. They think I can finally take a break, stay home, and relax. But for a multi-sport athlete, the end of a sports season is never really the end. The end of football in October means baseball starts. When you’re not playing a sport, you’re in the weight room preparing for the upcoming year. For me, weight room season is in the winter and the dog days of summer, where the awkward transition from the cooldown of baseball to the full speed of football takes place. The cycle never really ends for me. Fall is football season, winter is spent in the weight room, spring is baseball season, and summer is spent on football practice and baseball games. This is the best cycle for any multisport athlete to use for any sport in any season; however, some athletes have back-to-back seasons, making it hard to fit in time to lift.
Transitioning between sports is a demanding task, especially for football. One of the major transitions is in the summer, when football practice could overlap with baseball or other sports. Obviously, a game would take priority over practice, but it’s not that simple. The same applies to school; if you miss one class but attend other classes for the rest of the day, you need to make up for what you missed, while still making it up in another way, or just not making it up at all. Including tournaments for junior legion baseball, you could be playing five games in a weekend, then starting football practice on Monday, on top of attending strength and conditioning at the high school at 7 a.m. This is a packed schedule, even for playing two sports that don’t play games in the same season, when they are completely different from one another.
Transitioning between sports seasons as a multi-sport athlete is not only about what you do on the field; it’s what you do in the weight room. Lifting is a year-long thing, but the number of times you lift a week depends on the season. In the winter, when I’m not playing a sport, I will lift four times a week or more. In the summer, I could do the same in the morning before summer baseball. In the spring and fall, when high school baseball is in season, teams lift together either once or twice a week, depending on practice and game times. Being in the weight room not only helps you gain muscle, but it also helps you stay active when you can’t go outside in the cold. This is especially true for baseball, as there are not many indoor facilities available for direct offseason work. For any multi-sport athlete, lifting and conditioning year-round should be the bare minimum for any athlete who wants to succeed.
Not only does being a multi-sport athlete bring physically demanding challenges year-round, but it can also be very mentally draining. Playing two extremely different sports that overlap in the summer changes the mental side of both games. Going from football’s high intensity and physicality to baseball’s patience and precision means I have to adjust the way I think just as much as the way I play. Having to switch from football practice to a baseball game in less than an hour means I have that much time to warm up again after football. Getting reps at my position is where you really need to focus and switch your mindset. If I’m pitching, that means I really need to calm down, because getting aggressive and mad when pitching never works out. Having a bad football practice can also change your mental game because you’ve already gotten mad that you had a bad practice in football. So why should you think you would do better in baseball? Sports are already hard enough, and being mentally and physically drained couldn’t be any worse.
Many athletes struggle with the decision to participate in two sports in a single season, like choosing to play basketball or hockey. Is it even possible? Playing two very demanding sports in the same season, such as hockey and basketball, would be difficult and almost impossible. If you have two games on the same day, what do you do then? Even practices would be nearly every day after school, so how would you be able to prioritize one or the other? Every sport has its pros and cons with playing in the same season or back-to-back seasons, but is being a multi-sport athlete really a con? Studies show that 88% of professional athletes were multi-sport athletes in high school. The other 22% played one sport through high school. This is a statistic most people don’t take into account because a large majority of people who play in pro sports either played or encouraged athletes to play multiple sports.
