Advice from Nadal and Kids' Sports

Nowadays, one often hears people insisting that to produce truly competitive world-class athletes, “one should start them young” which, very often means, letting kids younger than 13 years, go through the same punishing almost-daily regimen prescribed for elite and professional athletes. To let kids go through such a regimen at an early age is putting more meaning into that phrase, an abuse and misuse of the phrase and, ultimately, tantamount to child abuse.

To remind us that “kids are kids” who should be treated as such, it may be instructive to once again invoke best practice in kids’ sports in some parts of the world.

Singapore has the Singapore Sprint Series which opened a kids and youth category for the first time last year, according to Lai Yi Ming in the Aug. 29, 2011 issue of Singapore Straits Times. In addition, there is the Standard Chartered Marathon Singapore (SCMS) on Dec. 4 which will also feature a non-competitive (note, non-competitive or basically a fun activity where competition is incidental) Kids Dash category for children who are 12 years old and below, says David Voth, senior director of sports business at Singapore Sports Council (SSC), counterpart of the Philippine Sports Commission.

Various groups in Singapore have different protocols but their primordial interest which is non-negotiable is the kids’ safety. “For children aged six years and below who are participating in Kids Dash, it’s compulsory for a parent or guardian to accompany each of them during the race. These children will also be issued (an identification tag for safety purposes as well,” says Voth.

Whichever group however advocates and does what, Dr Kevin Lee, Singapore Medical Group’s medical director at Singapore Sports Orthopedic Surgery Centre and Centre for Joint and Cartilage Surgery, says that training in athletic activities at a young age promotes a healthy lifestyle in children and they tend to continue leading a physically active lifestyle in adulthood. However, he cautions parents (and, may I add, sports officials), not to get carried away as their young bodies are still developing and growing.”

According to Lai, Dr. Cormac O’Muircheartaigh, medical director of sports medicine at the Singapore Sports Institute (ideally, the counterpart of our own Philippine Institute for Sports or Philsports, had our sports authorities taken the work of Philsports to heart and tried to understand what its role in serious and strategic sports development like what Singapore, Australia, etc have done to mobilize their respective sports institutes), SSC, says, “The type of training and competition for children should take into account the age, development stage of the child, preexisting medical and muscoskeletal conditions.

“Safe training at any age includes pre-participation screening by a suitably trained physician and age-appropriate warm-up or cool down programs.

“Training frequency for endurance events should not exceed three times per week for those below 14 years old to allow for physiological recovery and adaptation to occur.”

With respect to the forthcoming Southeast Asian Games, those who have been assigned the task of doing a medal count and predicting an overall medals’ finish by the Philippines of higher than fourth place, it would do us well to factor in, among others, the performance of Singaporean swimmer Tao Li who capture two gold medals in the Guangzhou Asian Games in 2010. Tao Li is aiming to be the first Singaporean swimmer to bag a medal at next year’s London Olympics.

At the tennis US Open, at the time of this writing, top seed Novak Djokovic is all set to face defending champion and second seed Spaniard, Rafael Nadal for the title. Djokovic won over No. 3 seed Roger Federer, 6-7(7), 4-6. 6-3. 6-2, 7-5. Nadal, on the other hand, beat Andy Murray, 6-4, 6-2, 3-6, 6-2, in the other semifinal.

Nadal, who collapsed from severe cramps during a post-match press conference several days earlier, looked none the worse from the incident which had not a few worried to exert just enough effort to oust Murray from contention.

Nadal’s single-minded determination to defend his title can perhaps be confirmed by his statements in his autobiography, “Rafa”: “I stop being the ordinary me when a game is on. I try and become a tennis machine, even if the task is ultimately impossible. I am not a robot; perfection in tennis is impossible, and trying to scale a peak of your possibilities is where the challenge lies. During a match you are in a permanent battle to fight back your everyday vulnerabilities, bottle up our human feelings. The more bottled up they are, the greater your chances are of winning, so long as you’ve trained as hard as you play and the gap in talent is not too wide between you and your rival.”