Near the end of a long season, fourteen-year-old baseball
pitcher Ben Hyman approached his father with disappointing,
if not surprising, news: his pitching shoulder was tired.
With each throw to home plate, he felt a twinge in his
still maturing arm. Any doctor would have advised the young
boy to take off the rest of the season. Author Mark Hyman
sent his son out to pitch the next game. After all, it was
play-off time.
Stories like these are not uncommon. Over the last seventy-
five years, adults have staged a hostile takeover of kids’
sports. In 2003 alone, more than 3.5 million children under
age fifteen required medical treatment for sports injuries,
nearly half of which were the result of simple overuse. The
quest to turn children into tomorrow’s superstar athletes
has often led adults to push them beyond physical and
emotional limits.
In Until It Hurts, journalist, coach, and sports dad Mark
Hyman explores how youth sports reached this problematic
state. His investigation takes him from the Little League
World Series in Pennsylvania to a prestigious Chicago
soccer club, from adolescent golf and tennis superstars in
Atlanta to California volleyball players. He interviews
dozens of children, parents, coaches, psychologists,
surgeons, sports medicine specialists, and former
professional athletes. He speaks at length with Whitney
Phelps, Michael’s older sister; retraces the story of A
Very Young Gymnast, and its subject, Torrance York; and
tells the saga of the Castle High School girls’ basketball
team of Evansville, Indiana, which in 2005 lost three-
fifths of its lineup to ACL injuries. Along the way, Hyman
hears numerous stories: about a mother who left her fifteen-
year-old daughter at an interstate exit after a heated
exchange over her performance during a soccer game, about a
coach who ordered preteens to swim laps in three-hour
shifts for twenty-four hours.
Hyman’s exploration leads him to examine the history of
youth sports in our country and how it’s evolved,
particularly with the increasing involvement of girls and
much more proactive participation of parents. With its
unique multiple perspective—of history, of reporting, and
of personal experience—this book delves deep into the
complicated issue of sports for children, and opens up a
much-needed discussion about the perils of youth sports
culture today. Hyman focuses not only on the unfortunate
cases of overzealous parents and overly ambitious kids, but
also on how positive change can be made, and concludes by
shining a spotlight on some inspirational parents and model
sports programs, giving hope that the current destructive
cycle can be broken.
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