When Epstein began writing about the data that athletes who go on to become the elite are usually not the specializers, the reactions from parents was pure disbelief. Can’t be true! Maybe in some other sport, but that isn’t true in our sport!

Right?! We all learned from Gladwell’s 10,000 hours, deliberate practice, Tiger Mom, and from Earl Woods developing Tiger, before the age of 2. We all get caught up in the rat race to keep up, but research is showing that this form of early hyper-specialization isn’t the path for most elite athletes.

This book hit home with me as it reinforced my experiences from my professional tennis career and as a parent of multi-sport athletes. I can’t tell you how many parents interrupt me, just to say that things are different now. You don’t understand. Yes, they are very different. In my era, elite female players turned pro by 16, or they were considered too old. Parents aren’t quite sure what to say when I drop that bomb.

A quick bit of background and then I will get to my thoughts on “Range”.

I grew up playing volleyball, basketball, ballet, and cross-country track, with my primary sport being tennis. I did all of these sports through 8th grade and was still ranked top in the country winning 8 national tennis titles in middle school. And yes, I was sitting, butt in the chair, IN school until 2:30 most days. This is usually when I get an eye roll on how things have changed.

Here are the skills that the “other” sports did for my tennis. I loved volleyball because all my friends did it. I enjoyed the social piece, and not going to lie, being tall and able to serve overhand at a young age was good for the ego. Basketball was great for my tennis footwork, speed, learning plays and patterns, teamwork, and being coachable. If you don’t do what coach says, you get yanked (a peek into my tendencies). Ballet was painful being 5’8″ at 12 yrs. old for obvious reasons, but my mother was determined to pound some grace into me, no matter how much I complained. Cross country track gave me the endurance base that grew into one of my strengths as a tennis player. Peers may have been faster than I, but they certainly weren’t going to outlast me. I worked out with the basketball team before school my freshman and sophomore year of high school as well. Speed and agility were not my friends, so basketball was a perfect training tool for me.

While I was playing other sports, most of my elite tennis peers, were not. I was not the norm. I was of the era when the elite female players turned pro between the ages of 14 and 16. During this time, I had won 19 national titles, top-level ITF events, and played in all the junior slams. I was also still in school, where family and education came first.

My parents were adamant about me going to college. I can’t tell you how many people said they were crazy (and their surly daughter may have been one of them) because I was top 100 WTA Tour going into Stanford. I went on to play at Stanford for one year and then turn pro just before my 19th birthday. Most of my peers, who turned pro by 16, were finishing their career by 19 to 20 (as I was getting started) with burnout and injuries. I went on to play for 11 years and retired at 29 when I had my first child.

By my parents delaying my specialization, and I appeared to be behind, I ended up much farther ahead. Luckily, I have matured from my stubborn 16 yr old self and can admit that my parents were right. I am forever grateful for them sticking to their values and not falling into the trap of what everyone else was doing.

Ok, you get my story… now to the book and 15 takeaways on how it relates to parenting and coaching athletes.

1. Here is a brief summary of Epstein’s thoughts on early specialization for athletes:
When scientists examine the entire developmental path of athletes, from childhood, they typically devote less time to deliberate practice early in development and undergo what researches call a “sampling period”. They play a variety of sports, usually in unstructured or lightly structured environments; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learned about their own abilities and proclivities, and systematically delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels.

2. “The way we tell the stories of Tiger and Mozart is not right. In both cases, those fathers were reacting to the child’s display of interest and prowess earlier, not the reverse… So, you should not worry that you will miss that opportunity because if it’s there, it will show itself.” Not all our children are prodigies. These few are of the exception and become the best due to the incredible talent and the hard work.

3. “Elite athletes at the peak of their career do spend more time on focused, deliberate practice, but this doesn’t mean they were doing that as a child.” Parents and coaches can make the mistake of seeing what mature fully developed pros are doing in their 20s and 30s and think it is appropriate for their 15-yr old. Instead, look at what they were doing in their developmental years leading up to the elite level.

4. “Specializing too early, or rushing to specialize, before they learn to think, stops them from learning all the tools.” It appears that they are farther ahead, but actually, they are behind because they don’t have all the tools that they need to succeed long term.

5. “The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefit of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that is increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyper-specialization.” It is a challenge for families to continue multiple sports, staying in school, etc. to keep up with the kids who are specializing young, unlimited budgets, and practicing all day but at the end of the day, the early specialization is not at the top of the ranks.

6. One of the critical ideas of the book is that early specialization and lots of deliberate practice do work in certain “kind” environments, but it’s not as useful for succeeding in “wicked” environments.

A “kind” environment is one where all the information is totally available, you don’t have to search for it, patterns repeat, the possible situations are constrained so you’ll see the same sort of situations over and over, feedback on everything you do is both immediate and 100 percent accurate, there’s no human behavior involved other than your own.

In “wicked” environments, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns, and not all information is available when you have to make a decision. Typically, you’re dealing with dynamic situations that involve other people, judgments, and feedback.

I think of this as the skills and patterns we learn in drills vs. the learning environment in unsupervised set and match play. Kids are doing way too many drills and not enough sets/match play. Just because you master a drill doesn’t mean you know how to translate it onto the playing field. We see it all the time where the “best player” isn’t necessarily the one who wins.

7. “The helping and codling behavior, which causes the best performance in the short-run can damage development in the long-run.” Too much coaching and monitoring of practices are “helping” the athlete too much. Toni Nadal also spoke to this in his TEDx Talk. Kids must learn independence and how to figure things out on their own to be smart and adaptable during competition.

8. “Are you better off with more specialized training, rather than interdisciplinary cross-training to become more well-rounded?” When you look at the elite level athletes across all sports, they are ATHLETES and not just tennis players or golfers. To avoid injuries and become a more well-rounded athlete, chose a complementary activity rather than getting sport-specific training at a young age.

9. Overspecialization. When you have mulitple coaches working on one shot (serve coach, volley coach, groundstroke coach) and no one is working together to see the bigger picture and how all the parts come together.

10. “Scientists are required to show the immediate and tangible results of their work vs. the exploration of free play, which is where the greatest changes and breakthroughs occur.” I compare this to the overuse of clinics and drills with one goal in mind, versus the unsupervised set play where the player gets the most improvement in learning how to win points.

11. “Approach your own personal voyage and projects willing to learn and adjust as you go, and even to abandon a previous goal and change directions entirely should the need arise.” Make sure you are re-evaluating your child’s goals and the pathway. Just because they had a goal at 13 doesn’t mean it is still the right path for them at 16.

12. “Even when you move on from on from one area of work or an entire domain, that experience is not wasted.” Persistence and sunk cost fallacy can prevent people from exploring new paths.” If your child wants to switch sports or change his/her path, don’t think the time has been wasted. They will take those skills with them, and they will benefit them in their next endeavor.

13. “In sports, think about the financial interest involved in the pressures to hyperspecialized. Many adults have an enormous financial interest in making it seem essential. It is in the interest of people who run youth sports leagues to claim that year-round devotion to one activity is necessary for success, never mind evidence to the contrary.” Look at who is telling you that you need to take more lessons, clinics, or home school. Does that person financially gain from those decisions? Do they have their own interests at stake?

14. “Head start comes fast, but deep learning comes slow.” “Learning is the most efficient in the long run when it is the most inefficient in the short run.” Athletic development is a marathon, not a sprint. The concrete skills that we learn early can be done efficiently with drills, the less tangible skills of learning how to put all those skills and shots together come slower and later and through match practice.

15. Here are three pieces of advice that Epstein gave in an interview that resonated with me as a parent and a coach:

First off, I think something that applies to every level of athlete is that they should introduce variety into whatever they’re doing. This improves performance and reduces injury.

Secondly, there is this cultural notion that we can simply introspect or take a personality quiz and learn who we are. But it doesn’t work like that. To better understand your strengths, weaknesses, and interests, you actually have to try stuff. In other words, you learn who you are in practice. Experimentation, trying different stuff, can feel like wasted time, but in fact, you are working toward maximizing what economists call “match quality,” or the degree of fit between your skills, interests, and what you do. Time experimenting is not a sunk cost. It’s an investment in long-term development.

Lastly, drop your obsession with precocity, or what I call the “cult of the head starts”. Voluminous evidence shows that head starts tend to show a “fadeout” effect, both in sports and other areas. A common trait amongst happy high performers is that they adopt a “plan-and-adjust” mentality, rather than sticking to ironclad long-term goals.

Epstein closes the book with one sentence of advice to parents: Don’t feel behind.
“Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You may not even know exactly where you are going, so feeling behind doesn’t help.”

I was one of the athletes, who felt they were behind, but I ended up ahead in many ways. There are many paths to the elite level of sports, and there are many offshoots where the skills learned in sports will help in all aspects of life. Don’t get caught up with the Jones’, ask questions to see the big picture, trust your instincts as a parent, and stay true to your family values.

I would love to hear your thoughts on Epstein’s book and how it applies to you as a parent, parent of an athlete, as a coach, or reflections with your own athletic career. Please share in the comments section or in our #Get a Grip Facebook Group.

Thank you to our #Get a Grip Newsletter reader, Marc, for the email suggestion to share “Range” with everyone. Happy reading, enjoy Wimbledon, and have a great July 4th week!