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Chandan Sappal was a young quarterback at Saint Louis School, which produced Heisman Trophy winner Marcus Mariota and runner-up Tua Tagovailoa. He was a regular at Crusaders varsity quarterbacks coach Vince Passas’ clinics.
He went to Louisiana for the Manning Passing Academy, hosted by NFL star quarterbacks Archie, Peyton and Eli Manning. Russell Wilson, Andrew Luck and Mariota are some of the NFL quarterbacks who participated in the annual camp while in high school.
Sappal was seemingly on a possible path to a college football scholarship.
But going into his junior year of high school, Sappal needed a break. He realized there could be only one quarterback on the field at a time, and he was just one of several vying for the starting spot for the Crusaders.
“I was working really hard, but I felt like I wasn’t going to play that much, and I felt like it was getting tiring, that I was working hard for nothing,” Sappal said. “I got tired of it and decided to take a year off.”
Sappal returned to the Saint Louis varsity last fall, for his senior season, and was a backup.
He will attend Oregon this fall. He said he might walk on, but has not been contacted by the football coaches to come out for the team at the college where Mariota starred.
When he got serious about football, Sappal stopped playing baseball. If he’d stayed with either sport without a break, Sappal said, he believes he could have played in college. “Yeah, I think so,” he said. “But I don’t regret it.
“I feel like when you start from a really young age, you can get tired of it over time. Then if you’re not starting or playing a lot it can get tiring.”
Derrick Low never tired of basketball.
Low was passionate about the game from the time he started playing it at Kalakaua gym under the tutelage of Dennis Agena at age 6. Soon he was schooling grown men in pickup games, then leading ‘Iolani to three state championships, starring at Washington State, and later enjoying a long international professional career.
At his ProFormance youth clinics, Low and his partner Kyle Pape say it’s OK for some young kids — depending on their goals — to start specializing in basketball.
“We’re already behind (the mainland). In basketball the gap is bigger (than other sports). Every sport is different,” Low said. “From a very young age I knew basketball was my path. I played baseball for a couple of years, because my dad was a baseball guy. Then after a couple of seasons I started in basketball.”
While Low was starting to make his mark at ‘Iolani, Michelle Wie was a pre-teen golf prodigy. The phenom stuck to the links, as it was obvious that was her future. As a teenager she sometimes competed with many of the world’s best men’s players.
“There are so many factors,” said her first coach, Casey Nakama, acknowledging that it might be wise for an athlete with the unique raw talent of Wie to stick to one sport. But in most cases, he prefers that his players at the Casey Nakama Junior Golf Academyalso participate in other sports.
“I like for them to learn the team concept,” said Nakama, who competed in basketball, football and track before taking up golf in college. “Golfers that only play golf, they realize it affects only them when they play poorly, and a lot turn the motor off. If you’re on a team you cannot do that … if you’re having a bad day . You still gotta battle because others are depending on you. We do team exercises to show them that is important.”
Nakama also encourages his students to take a break from most golf activities for at least two months (September and October).
“It’s OK if they play a little with their friends for fun,” he said.
Rachel Coel, a doctor at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children who specializes in pediatric sports, recently attended an American Medical Society for Sports Medicine seminar exploring early sports specialization.
“It’s not cut and dry” if sports specialization is the main culprit in overuse injuries, Coel said.
“Volume is probably the main issue — too much of anything, even a good thing like exercise, can be a bad thing,” she said. “The body doesn’t have time to rest and recover, and over time the body may break down and become injured.
“Doing a single sport to the exclusion of others may not be a problem if a child is given time off to rest and recover, or do free play and mix it up,” Coel added.
Dr. Neeru Jayanthi of the Emory University School of Medicine is also an authority on youth sports health.
“Young athletes who were injured tended to have more intense specialized training in one sport,” Jayanthi said after presenting a study on the issue in 2011. “We should be cautious about intense specialization in one sport before and during adolescence. Parents should consider enrolling their children in multiple sports.”