Opinion | Top athletes are better at younger ages

Joe Perrino, Sports Editor

Patrick Mahomes is 25. Fernando Tatis Jr. and Luka Doncic are only 21. Ansu Fati is younger than I am, at 18.

What do all of these young athletes have in common? While they may not all be the best players in their sports – football, baseball, basketball and soccer respectively –  they are some of the most recognizable and talked-about names across the athletic landscape. Don’t be fooled by their youth – their talent level measures up to any veteran within their sports. 

Over the past few years, young athletes have dominated the sports zeitgeist. 

For example, Mahomes’ first season as the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs’ starting quarterback saw him win a 2018 Most Valuable Player (MVP) award. That’s unheard of. The very next year, Baltimore Ravens’ quarterback Lamar Jackson – 22 at the start of the season – was named 2019 MVP in his first full season as a starting quarterback. And it doesn’t stop in football; Doncic, who has two NBA seasons under his belt with the Dallas Mavericks, has broken several records over the course of his young career.

How have these athletes – many the same exact age as us college students (yikes) – been able to dominate their field and produce so highly against veterans with 10 more years of experience?

Here’s my take. Growing up playing competitive baseball, I understand the increased commitment it takes to play a sport nowadays even at a high school level. The sport becomes the athletes’ entire lives. 

For a club sport, you practice a minimum of three times a week, along with additional workouts. On top of that, you’re playing in tournaments or scrimmages almost every weekend. That’s nearly 15 hours of activity a week for just a club team, which bumps up to at least 20 once high school starts.

I can only imagine how much more rigorous that activity becomes at the college level. A few of my friends have gotten the opportunity to play baseball at a Division I level. One of them, at the University of California, Los Angeles, said they spend between 40 to 48 hours a week practicing or playing. That’s a full-time job.

Is this different now than it used to be?

According to one of my past coaches, the answer is yes. He was a former player in the MLB’s minor league system and told my team how much better and more refined our skills were at the high school level than he and his teammates were at the college level.

In addition to rapid improvements in coaching and preparation, technology and medicine has offered a lot of room for youth improvement.

For instance, in one of my old travel ball organizations, the coaches invested in a “smart cage.” This batting cage tracked everything that had to do with our swing: its path, its speed and the angle at which the bat made contact with the ball. This type of technology wasn’t widely available even five years ago; experiences like this are what allow athletes nowadays to train harder and focus in more specified areas.

If advancements continue to progress this rapidly, perhaps even Mahomes, Doncic and other younger, professional athletes will become obsolete before they even reach their athletic prime.