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0:01 I'm Bryant Gumbel of HBO's Real Sports, with a report on the growing professionalization of youth sports across America, and at the physical price that it's exacting from the kids involved. JON FRANKEL: Emily Gervais was supposed to be a soccer star. She'd given the sport all she had for as long as she could remember. Good headshots! Keep that up! FRANKEL: And like more and more young athletes today, she had sky-high aspirations. It wasn't even just, "I want to play college." It was, "I want to play Division One soccer." And did that seem realistic? It was realistic. FRANKEL: Emily started playing soccer when she was four. By the time she was 11, she was playing the sport year-round on an elite club team. Club was 11 months out of the year.
0:47 You'd get a break July, you're coming back August. This was pretty much day in, day out, week in, week out, month after month. There are girls out there that are practicing all day, every day, and if you're not one of them, they will beat you to the spot you want. And if you want that spot, you'd better play round the clock, all year round. This better be your everything if you want to be good at it. Real good at it. Not, "Mom said I was good at it." FRANKEL: But after all that work and all those practices, this is all Emily can do on a soccer field, -(EMILY YELLING INSTRUCTIONS) -help coach her high school team from the sidelines. Guys, we're giving it up! We gotta stay with it. FRANKEL: After three major surgeries on her knee to repair three major tears,
1:33 Emily's been forced to retire from the game at the age of 16. How many varsity soccer games did you play -for your high school? -Four games. People play four years, and I got four games. FRANKEL: Now, Emily is part of a different club, the growing group of young athletes seeking help from this man, Min Kocher, a renowned orthopedic surgeon at Boston Children's Hospital. DR. KOCHER: Nice and relaxed. This is the ACL test. FRANKEL: It's a trend that has left Kocher alarmed, to the point where he began collecting data from other surgeons around the country to find out if they were seeing it, too. What Kocher learned was disturbing. The number of ACL reconstructions on children and adolescents had spiked nearly five times in just a decade.
2:19 What did you think when you saw those numbers coming in? I was shocked because a four to five-fold increase over ten years is pretty dramatic in medicine. We don't see a lot of things increasing that rapidly. Um, but on the other hand, I felt like, yeah, that-- It's validation. This is what I've been seeing in my clinic. Quinn, nice to see you, buddy. Wanna shake that hand? -(GIGGLES) -You ready to get fixed up? FRANKEL: We visited Dr. Kocher one day this month, when he was scheduled to do major surgery on five young athletes, like Quinn, a 12-year-old who tore his ACL playing soccer last summer. We were invited to watch the operation. DR. KOCHER: So, Jon, this is his IT band. So, this is the graft that we use, um, to reconstruct his ACL, and this is a graft that we use,
3:09 uh, in the very young, prepubescent, um, patients like Quinn. If Quinn is fairly typical, where does he fall on your roster of patients to date? My first two were ACL reconstructions in adolescent boys. Saline. And the third case was an 11-year-old girl with a meniscus problem. Most people would be surprised to know that you're doing orthopedic surgery on somebody as young as 11, and have done it on kids younger than that. Are you finding that all too routine now? I am finding that very routine. Yeah. FRANKEL: It's all part of a trend we've been reporting on for the last three years. The professionalization of youth sports, which has become a 19-billion-dollar industry, fueled by kids and their parents pursuing athletic achievement at seemingly any cost.
3:56 The financial cost is clear, with kids traveling the country weekend after weekend and taking private lessons from 100-dollar-an-hour coaches. Less well-known are the physical costs, as young people, determined to keep up with the competition, are picking a single sport at a very young age, then playing it several hours a day virtually every day of the year until their body simply gives out. Is a seven, an eight, a nine-year-old kid -unusual for you? -Not anymore. Five, ten years ago, everyone would come and take a look at it. "Oh, my god. There's an eight-year-old getting an ACL surgery done." Now it's like, "Oh, another eight-year-old? That's great. Just go ahead and do the surgery." FRANKEL: Dr. Nirav Pandya is a surgeon at the University of California San Francisco.
4:41 He says that the number of surgeries he does on child athletes has doubled in just the last five years. But he doesn't sound happy about all the extra business. When you take a step back, especially having my own children, and thinking about, this isn't just this knee that you're doing a surgery on. This is a kid who should just be playing with their Legos, and suddenly they're going through this serious surgery that most adults have a difficult time dealing with. That's the scary thing, and that makes me sad the most. These are injuries directly related to... Trying to be a professional athlete at age nine. You cannot be nine and-- and try and take on the practice schedule, the training schedule, of a pro athlete. Your bodies aren't designed for that. Absolutely not. I have some kids whose knees I've looked at and everything is just torn up and, you know, when you look inside the knee, you're like, "Am I operating on a 60-year-old or am I operating on a 12-year-old?"
5:28 MAN: Finish at the top. Finish at the top. FRANKEL: Last month at Dr. Pandya's office, we met one of his regulars, Alysia, a 16-year-old gymnast who's already hurt her back, broken bones in her foot and leg, and partially torn a ligament in her knee. Can you give me a sense of-- of how much time you're putting in as a gymnast? Um, almost 25 hours a week. Did you say to her, this is from doing this over and over and over? We talked about how much you were doing. -ALYSSIA: (CHUCKLES) Yeah. -And it's always a-- Always a conversation we have every visit. And-- And were you receptive to that conversation, when he said to you, this might be from doing this a little bit too much? Yeah, it's just hard to not go that much and still be at the level I am. FRANKEL: Now, Dr. Pandya fears that Alysia
6:13 is heading down the same road as her brother and sister, also young athletes, who are starting to break down. So, her older brother, uh, tore his ACL, and then her younger sister that I just saw, um, had a shoulder injury, um, overuse from swimming. -Are you nervous for her? -I am, yeah. And I tell her that. You know, I'm nervous about the-- The next one leading to a surgery like her brother had. Well, gymnastics is kind of just what's always been there for me, so, like, without it, I really don't know what to do. FRANKEL: Back in Boston... THERAPIST: Tighten and lift, and yep, just up parallel, perfect... FRANKEL: ...Emily Gervais is in rehab too, after her third major knee surgery. On a recent visit to Dr. Kocher's office, Emily met Mia, another casualty of the injury epidemic.
6:59 Mia tore her ACL right before her freshman year of high school, just as Emily did two years ago. Whenever my friends complain about running, I just say, "Don't talk to me about it, I don't care." -EMILY GERVAIS: I would give anything to run. -Exactly. I'm like, "Well at least you can, so..." It's such a vivid memory, I'm sure for everyone, of like the exact moment of when it happened. And all you can ever think of is, you know, "What I'd go back and do different." FRANKEL: For Emily, it's only been a few months since Dr. Kocher gave her the toughest news of her young life, that her soccer career was over. It was shock, it was disbelief, and... I felt like it was a dream. Ride home, ride to school the next day, in school, riding back from school, I just kept expecting myself to wake up.
7:47 FRANKEL: Now, like many sidelined young athletes, she has to cope without the sport she's loved her whole life. She still spends as much time as possible with the team, girls she's played with for years. They're my family. I wouldn't have been able to go through all this without them. They've been there, through all of it. They've brought me hope, and they've showed me what I fight for. When I look at them, I see me, and I do get jealous, I see what I wish I was. But, I know that if I can tell them to love it, and they truly are loving it, that was my role, you know? I am serving them in a way. FRANKEL: The question is, "What will it take
8:33 to change an American youth sports system that produces so many sad outcomes, just like Emily's?" -DR. JAYANTHI: Hi, guys, how are you? -Good, how are you? FRANKEL: Dr. Neeru Jayanthi at Emory University in Atlanta, says that it's time for parents and sports administrators to act. That this is a public health crisis. And that he's got the numbers to prove it. We have data that's quite clear, that you're more than twice as likely, not only just to get an injury, but to get a serious overuse injury if you specialize in sports. That seems to be a pretty clear and easy data point to explain to somebody, that if you let your kid specialize in one sport, and play season after season, you're more than twice as likely to get an overuse injury. Yes. Why do we wear seatbelts? Why do we stop smoking? We have data.
9:19 We now have data on this. FRANKEL: Dr. Jayanthi presented his research this month at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. The sad truth is, is that elite-level youth sports is not something that improves your health today. FRANKEL: Back at his practice, he frequently delivers the same message to kids and their parents. Stay with the rehab program. We're not ready to get back to volleyball. Um... FRANKEL: For families caught up in the grind of youth sports, that can be a tough conversation. We invited a group of parents whose children are patients of Dr. Jayanthi to ask them: why they don't just buck the system? When your child is loving what they're doing every day, and-- and is actually looking forward to practice at the end of every day, how do you preemptively say, "We're gonna pull back"?
10:08 If your son or daughter comes to you and they love so deeply a sport, you want to do everything you can to provide them with those opportunities. FRANKEL: But when the injuries get more serious, so do the choices parents have to make, which is what happened to Shannon and Kirk Franz with their daughter Maddie, a soccer player with a bad knee who is already on a regular treatment plan designed for the elderly. SHANNON FRANZ: They started her on a series of... It's osteoarthritis medicine. And they do, um, three injections three weeks in a row. And then she-- her knee feels good and stays in place for about six months. -When I listen to that... -It sounds crazy, I agree. I agree. You took the words right out of my mouth.
10:54 -(LAUGHING) -No, I mean, she has worn out her knees at the ripe-old-age of 17, and I don't know what that means for her future, and it scares me. What if I were to tell you what doctors will tell you are the long-term consequences? She'll need knee surgery, eventually. Knee replacement eventually. We just-- We just like, like, you're gonna be hobbling around at the age of 30. So, is that worth it? I don't know. Thank you for watching. Remember, you can catch the rest of the latest edition of Real Sports all month long on HBO. ♪ ("REAL SPORTS" THEME PLAYS) ♪
