Spring into action -- but try not to overschedule

Why is spring always the craziest time of the year for youth sports?

With the move by all sports to have more of a year-round presence, it seems that every sport has a spring season. Soccer, basketball and hockey all offer spring seasons, and that means a lot of kids find themselves playing multiple sports in the spring. This makes for some hectic weekends for families, especially families who have several kids playing multiple sports at the same time.

For the most part, it's hectic, but fun. But parents do need to use common sense and not fall prey to too much overscheduling.

In our area, lacrosse is getting more and more popular every year, for boys and girls. And a lot of kids who are already playing baseball or softball are starting to try lacrosse. Since some of those kids are also playing travel soccer, that means they are juggling three sports in the same season. And in our particular town, kids are required to play baseball and softball in the recreation league if they want to play on the travel teams, which means a kid playing travel baseball/softball is also playing rec baseball/softball. So if he or she is also playing travel soccer and lacrosse, that means simultaneously playing on four teams, in three sports.

The kids want to play everything, of course, which is as it should be. But as parents, sometimes we have to take a hard look at all the logistics and make more practical decisions. With all the games and practices and unavoidable conflicts, what ends up happening a lot of the time is the kids don't get enough practice time for a particular sport. They prioritize the games over the practices, which is reasonable. But if they don't practice, it's tough to have success in the games. And that's not fair to the kid or the team that is counting on the kid to be the best player he or she can be.

A couple years ago, my son's lacrosse team had the misfortune of having its practices scheduled for the same time as the soccer team. We had several soccer players on the lacrosse team and it ended up that most of the lacrosse practices were poorly attended -- usually with less than half the roster showing up. With so few kids, the coaches weren't able to go over things like offensive plays or defensive positioning, and every practice, all they could do at practice was just work on the most elementary skills. So on game days, our kids could run fast and throw and catch well enough, but they often didn't know where to go on the field. The result was a lot of lopsided losses that season.

Multiple sport conflicts are going to be unavoidable when kids are young and still trying to sample everything and figure out what sports they want to play. But as they get older, eventually, kids are going to have to start to narrow down the number of sports they play. If your kid is missing practice twice a week for a particular sport and is only playing a half of a game on the weekend because he or she has to leave and go somewhere else to play another sport, it might be time to cut back.