Zeroed In: Academies provide intense training for young athletes

The message at the bottom of the Hank Haney International Junior Golf Academy's Web site reflects what seems to be the prevailing theory behind the trend toward single-sport specialization among today's young athletes.

"Champions are trained, not born."

As more athletes choose to specialize in one sport at an earlier age, elite training academies such as the Smith-Stearns and Van der Meer tennis academies, Bob Butterfield's International Academy of Tennis and the IJGA -- all on Hilton Head Island -- have become a booming business.

"In a sport like tennis, you have to spend time and get things technically correct if you're going to play at a high level," said Justyn Schelver, the head pro at Van der Meer Tennis Academy. "For tennis players especially, if you're going to develop, you've got to do it by a certain point to be able to either play professionally or play at a high college level. If you're not devoting pretty much the whole year to that sport, you're going to be behind."

On Hilton Head Island alone, hundreds of young athletes are choosing to do exactly that at academies like Van der Meer, where it's not uncommon for students to spend 30 to 35 hours training, between court time and conditioning.

Researchers suggest early specialization can wrack young athletes with undue pressure to excel, limit their meaningful social interactions and isolate them from peers.

Sports academies like those found on Hilton Head Island can provide solutions to those potential problems, according to Haney, the head instructor and part owner of the IJGA and the swing coach to the game's top player, Tiger Woods.

"People that excel at anything are a little less balanced than most people," Haney said. "There's plenty of balance here (at IJGA). They have school. They have camaraderie with the other students. It's kind of like a big team in that sense.

"The important thing to us is that they try to learn skills that will help them be successful, no matter what they do in life."

Dan Gould, director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University, agrees academies can play a valuable role in the training of young athletesas long as the athletes are highly motivated and the academy offers more than athletic training.

"The two dangers I see are sometimes it's more the parents who want the academy than the kid, and an academy is a business, and a business needs to turn a profit," Gould said.

To that end, Gould says parents need to be realistic when assessing their child's talent and not be lured in at the mere suggestion of a professional career that more often than not turns out to be unattainable.

Haney said a swing can be learned, and if a golfer possesses elite-level talent, success is simply a matter of whether the pupil is mentally tough during competition and dedicated during practice. By the same token, without the musculature to generate the tremendous clubhead speed of professional golfers, all the practice in the world won't turn even the most dedicated student into Tiger Woods.

Haney, who has taught juniors for 30 years and has four schools in Texas, said he can watch a golfer swing and know within 30 seconds to a minute if he or she has the potential to play professionally.

"Keep in mind, I've been doing this a long time," he said with a wry smile.

That's another thing elite-level academies such as the IJGA can provide that a traditional sports experience can't -- not many high school coaches double as high-profile professional instructors, like Haney, Van der Meer and Stearns, or have major championships to their name like Smith.

But even the people who run these year-round training academies say it's not the correct route for everyone.

"It depends upon their maturity and their interest," said Stan Smith, who teamed with renowned instructor Billy Stearns to form Smith Stearns in 2002. "If they're not really mature enough to concentrate, then maybe the full-time program isn't right for them. And if they're not mature enough physically, you really have to keep an eye on that."

Before he was a tennis legend, Smith was a three-sport athlete -- none of them tennis -- and when his kids were growing up, Smith urged them to play multiple sports.

"My philosophy is that you want to develop the full athletic ability," said Smith, who won U.S. Open and Wimbledon titles in the early 1970s, when he was the game's top-ranked player. "Sports like basketball, particularly, but football and baseball, too, help develop some of the athletic skills that are helpful in general, as far as balance and coordination. ...

"Secondly, I wanted my kids to do whatever they wanted to do."

That, Smith said, is the key to having success with a year-round training program like those offered at Smith Stearns Tennis Academy, where students are on the court as much as three hours a day, six days a week when they're not playing in tournaments. Although Smith encourages students to pursue other interests off the court -- athletic or otherwise -- it's imperative that their first love is tennis.

"The main thing is that they really enjoy what they're doing," Smith said. "If it gets to be too much of a chore, then they're not going to progress and not going to do as well as they could."

Indeed, these academies aren't for novice players who aren't certain they want to pursue at least a collegiate career in their chosen sport.

"Once a kid commits to going at it, it's a full-time gig," Schelver said. "When you're talking about 30 hours a week on the court, that doesn't really leave any room for a whole lot else, other than to get their school work and their academics taken care of. Once they've decided, it's basically all or nothing."

Island Packet sports editor Jeff Kidd contributed to this report.