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"How many of you have this problem at your schools?," Adams recalls the presenter asking at the National Conference of High School Directors of Athletics.
"And everybody's hand went up," Adams said.
It seems Bluffton High School's athletics director isn't alone in his concern. According to Michigan State University's Institute for the Study of Youth Sports, the majority of high school athletics directors believe sports specialization is on the rise. Of the 152 athletics directors who participated in a survey on specialization, 70 percent felt it was on the rise, because of factors including pressure from coaches, high parental expectations, athletes' desire to participate in championships, encouragement from college recruiters and a societal emphasis on specialization.
"It's kind of a pet peeve of mine because we have seen it just in the last 10 or 15 years," said Adams, who has been involved in high school athletics for two decades. "High school used to just be a place where kids played, and it was very seasonal. If you drove through a neighborhood in the fall, kids were kicking a football. In the wintertime, you were shooting a basketball. And in the summertime, you played baseball."
Not anymore, he says. Even at a fairly large school such as Bluffton, Adams says multi-sport athletes are disappearing, and at small schools such as Hilton Head Christian Academy and Hilton Head Preparatory School, the concern is even greater.
"I don't know that we would ever fold up programs," Hilton Head Christian athletics director Tommy Lewis said. "But I think even right now, a lot of our teams and programs aren't as strong as they could be if kids would play more than just their primary sport."
That's the harsh reality for many high school athletics programs, particularly at smaller schools, as more and more athletes choose to play one sport year-round. So Lewis and Hilton Head Prep athletics director Jim Brown are doing everything they can to get their schools' students to play more than one sport, from handing out awards to three-sport athletes to combing the school's halls and encouraging students to join sports teams.
"We certainly can't have that happen here at Prep, or we wouldn't be able to field any teams," Brown said of the trend toward one-sport specialization.
Brown estimates about 70 to 75 percent of Prep's athletes play multiple sports, and he attributes much of the Dolphins' success to that number. For example, 10 of the 13 players on this year's girls basketball team -- which won its fourth consecutive SCISAA Class 3-A state title -- also played on the soccer team, which won its third consecutive state title.
If any or all of those teams' key players had chosen to focus on one sport or the other, both teams' title hopes might have been jeopardized.
Hilton Head Christian's state champion football team from 2006 provides another example; 14 of the 16 players who started for the Eagles' football team in the 2006 SCISAA Class 2-A title game played multiple sports for the Christian Academy that year, and two of them were three-sport athletes.
Lewis, who doubles as the Eagles' football coach, is such a proponent of playing multiple sports that he tried to launch a wrestling program at the school three years ago to give boys another sporting option for the winter season, when basketball is the only sport the school offers. (The team disbanded after a season.) When hiring coaches, Lewis said he and headmaster Mike Lindsey try to impress upon candidates the importance of encouraging multi-sport participation in a small-school environment.
"At the outset, we try to make sure the coaches we hire buy into the multi-sport philosophy," Lewis said. "That's not to say that a coach doesn't make himself available to work with a kid who just wants to focus on one sport. We don't want our coaches turning away kids that have made that decision."
Neither can they afford for too many to choose that path.
During the Christian Academy's spring football practice last month, Lewis perused a roster of students he had targeted as potential football players and lamented the number of gifted athletes who don't plan to play football next season because they want to focus on another sport year-round.
"We have a state championship team right there in our halls, if we could just get everyone to play," he said.
Frustration aside, Lewis is optimistic the trend will pass.
"I'm willing to bet that eventually there's going to be a backlash from it," Lewis said. "Whether it's psychologists or orthopedists, or whatever, if they come out and say this is a bad trend, that these kids aren't developing the right way, I think eventually there's going to be a backlash and we're going to come full-circle.
"Whether we're a few years away from that or a couple of decades, I guess time will tell."
