SAN ANTONIO — Kids are getting ready to go back to school, and that means back to school sports are ramping up. In tonight's Wear The Gown we find out that for children playing two sports is better than one.
It is called multi-sports, or playing more than one sport. But the benefit isn't just learning more than one sport. It is to keep their bodies safer.
"One is to get him off the couch to to meet other like minded kids out here playing sports, you know, in a safe environment," said Joe Moody who enrolled his son Christian in Skyhawks Sports Academy. The other reason he enrolled him had to do with sports variety.
"I think they're working on three different sports, soccer, football and baseball," he said. "I want to expose them to different sports at a young age."
"The benefit of multi-sports, too, is that we're not overusing one muscle," said Ally Reid, the owner of Skyhawks Sports Academy San Antonio. "So we're going to hit a lot of different skills and lots different ways where they get to work on their whole body and not just isolate one one arm."
An American Orthopaedic Society report found more than 3.5 million children in that age group need treatment each year for sports-related injuries. Stanford Children's Health says more than 775,000 annual emergency room visits occur by children ages fourteen and younger occur due to sport-related injuries. And a report by SafeKids found that youth make up 12% of all ER visits involving concussions, with a child visiting the ER once every three minutes on average.
"We want to make sure kids understand safety, too, so when they do it on their own recreationally or go out into adulthood, they understand how to look after the body and treat themselves right," Reid added.
One of the ways to do that is through multiple sports which use all muscle in the body.
"If we get kids like the chance to try lots of fun sports, our young age and exposure being more important to specialization, that's really the route we're going down," Reid said.
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