Blue Devil Coaches Promoting Multi-Sport Athletes

In an age of sport specialization, Huntington High School coaches are working together to encourage students to once again take up the challenge of being a multi or even three-sport athlete, a once relatively common occurrence that has become increasingly rare.

The Section XI Gold Key Award is presented to seniors who have played on the JV or varsity level during eight of nine possible seasons over the course of grades 10-12. There were only 17 members of Huntington’s Class of 2024 that captured the Gold Key Award after just 11 members of the Class of 2023 were able to achieve the designation. Blue Devil coaches hope to see that figure multiply many times over the next few years.

Multi-sport athletes were once taken for granted, but as specialization has grown, there have been fewer and fewer of them. While that isn’t the case at every high school in every state or even regionally, it has had an impact on participation levels across the board. The Blue Devil coaching staff wants to change that moving forward.

Blue Devil coaches have been meeting informally with athletic department officials and each other, discussing what they can do to encourage their team members to participate on additional Huntington teams. The coaches have noticed that at some competing schools there is a much greater prevalence of three sport athletes and have concluded that in order to field the best possible teams, Huntington needs to see three-sport athletes become more common among the Blue Devils.

Regular season and Super Bowl MVP quarterback Patrick Mahomes is a poster-child for three sport athletes. While well-known for his football stats, he was also a high school basketball and baseball star. As a baseball pitcher he threw a 93 mile-per-hour fastball and batted nearly .500 and was drafted professionally by the Detroit Tigers. In basketball, he averaged 19.2 points and 8.3 rebounds his senior season.

In a typical year, nearly 90 percent of NFL first round draft picks are multi-sport athletes. In one recent NFL draft, 30-of-32 first round picks played two or more sports.

“Being a multisport athlete has many advantages and some of them might surprise you,” according to a June 2023 article posted on the SportsEngine.com website. “Consistent performers with fewer injuries, multi-sport athletes actually tend to experience longer-term success over their one-sport peers. Playing multiple sports gives athletes time to heal and develop different muscle groups, tendons and ligaments. With the rise in overuse injuries in youth sports, this is an important point to consider. A recent American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine study also pointed out that sports specialization could lead to more lower extremity injuries.”

Multi-sport athletes also experience less pressure and less burnout. “Burnout is a real problem for athletes who specialize too early,” according to SportsEngine.com. “After all the practices, skill development and games growing up, they get sick of their sport by the time college comes around. Multi-sport athletes are more likely to retain their love of the game and accumulate cross-sport skills. Multi-sport athletes gain different kinds of skills that they can apply from one sport to the next. This enhances hand-eye coordination, balance, endurance, explosion, communication and athletic agility. Who wouldn’t want the speed of a sprinter with the hand-eye coordination of a baseball player on their team?”

Huntington High School has added multiple new junior varsity and varsity sports in the past two years, including varsity girls’ golf, girls’ gymnastics, boys’ and girls’ badminton, co-ed bowling, Unified basketball, Unified bowling, girls’ wrestling and girls’ flag football and JV boys’ golf and girls’ flag football.

No one should be surprised if the number of Section XI Gold Key Award recipients grows in Huntington in the near future.