RENO, Nev. — Steve Spurrier isn’t a fan of the trend toward specialization in athletes.
Speaking at a press conference ahead of the 2016 NFHS Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Reno on Friday, the former football coach at South Carolina, Florida, Duke and the Washington Redskins offered his thoughts on multi-sport athletes.
Spurrier played football, baseball and basketball at Science Hill High School in Tennessee in the 1960s.
“Not once did coaches say, ‘Steve, I wish you would stick with one of those sports,’” Spurrier said. “I wish high schools would promote that nowadays.”
Of the five athletes being inducted into the National High School Hall of Fame on Saturday, four of them played multiple sports in high school. That includes 1981 Steamboat Springs graduate Tom Southall, who played three sports — football, basketball and track — in high school, and also participated in music.
“You hate to limit the opportunities that kids can have,” Southall said. “But growing up in a small school, a small town, you had to do more than one sport or there wouldn’t be enough to go around. Part of it was by necessity that you would be a multi-sport athlete.”
Southall is now a teacher and assistant track coach at Cherokee Trail.
“As a coach now, track and field is the one that a lot of kids tend to want to specialize in,” Southall said. “I look back at the cross-over in skills between football and track — you want to get from here to there as fast as you can? Well then learn how to run fast to get from here to there.
“I’ve always tried to stress to the athletes that I work with, ‘Just go get out there and complete.’ Whether it’s football, basketball, whatever. Just find something that’s going to help you get that competitive edge. The crossover in skills is very important.”
Southall continued by saying, “You’ve got to kind of take the blinders off, and being so focused on, ‘Oh, I’ve got to get a college scholarship.’ There are some out there, but everyone’s not going to get one. So you need to make sure that you’ve got your broad base of knowledge, of skills.
“You hope that kids are able to play as many sports as they want to, and get benefits from the different sports and different aspects of competing. Just get out there and compete.”
