PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Greg Hitchcock, our running correspondent whose work is most often found in The Long Run, wrote this in response to Scott Molina's latest article on Developing America's talent. Hitch previously touched on the subject himself when writing about the decline, and the recent resurgence, in American junior running.

I read with great interest Scott Molina's article on Developing American talent and also the forum responses. This is the sort of thing I work on every day as executive director of the Oregon Sports Trust. I talk with coaches, and administrators from diverse sports such as tennis, baseball, running, swimming, nordic skiing and fencing.

The problem, as manifested by a lack of world class endurance athletes, is so pervasive and deeply rooted, it can cause a high degree of pessimism—even for an optimistic person. The problem really isn't that America does not produce enough world-class athletes, it is that we do not have enough kids even trying sports, let alone sticking with a sport for more than a season. As a result, there are less kids with talent entering programs, fewer of those with talent get identified, and then some of those slip away.

All in all, I think the three core sports of triathlon do a pretty good job of developing the talent they get. They simply do not get enough talent coming their way. The demographic trend (i.e., the "baby echo" generation) that I have noted before has caused a re-emergence of American endurance athletes. But this increase in elite athletes caused by an increase in the population of people of that age will never fulfill the true potential as long as the country is ever more sedentary.

The consequences for America and other pro-sedentary countries does not start with Olympic medal counts. The general negative health and productivity consequences from having a growing population of fat, poorly-conditioned people can be staggering. Our Olympic endurance athletes sit at the top of the athletic pyramid that is shrinking as American waistlines grow.

We see the pervasiveness of the problem in our schools. Mandatory physical education is a hit-and-miss proposition depending on your state or locality. According to Jack McCallum's April 24, 2000, article in Sports Illustrated on the decline of PE, only 26% of American kids get daily physical education. Many of the places that do have PE seem to have forgotten the whole point of PE. A PE teacher once told me that they got rid of the old presidential physical fitness tests because some kids could not succeed at the various challenges. By the same reasoning, we should eliminate math beyond pre-algebra, we can forget about literature beyond Dr. Seuss, and why even begin to describe the wonders of the atom?!

Kids do not do push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, timed runs, or anything remotely connected to developing physical fitness (composed of, in order of importance: endurance, strength/speed, flexibility, agility, and eye-hand or eye-foot coordination). Instead, PE teachers have become over-compensated recess monitors, while kids play such challenging games as mat-ball (a tamer version of slaughterball) and scarf-juggling.

The abdication of PE by schools not only has contributed to the decline in general fitness it has also meant that fewer kids are identified in PE as talented. Coaches used to mine the PE classes for kids with above average cardiovascular ability to fill up their teams. Without this resource, fewer kids are going to be encouraged to participate.

Outside of school we also see this decline in youth sports. According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association website, teenage participation in informal traditional sports has declined. In contrast, there has been a big increase in newer athletic activities like skateboarding and in-line skating, and an increase in organized team sports. However, these increases have not made up for the drop in general sports activity, and an increase in skateboarders does not portend a bright future for the development of world-class runners, swimmers and bicyclists. The summary of the report states: "Of the 28 activities for which data exist for both 1990 and 2000, participation declined in 15 of them. When we factor in the 20% growth in the teenage population that occurred during the decade, we see that 21 of the 28 most popular sports actually lost ground in terms of attracting teenage participants."

We know the causes for this societal decline: computers, video games, television, fattier foods, and the lousy PE curriculum briefly described above. If the smart folks who make their living from selling sporting goods cannot seem to budge the numbers in the right direction, what chance have we amateurs at getting kids to set aside the Gameboy?

Some sports have made good progress in making their sport more consumer-friendly, but have not reversed the trend. For example, tennis has developed much more enjoyable methods and surroundings to learn the game than when I learned with an old wood racket in my tennis whites. Kids get to wear their choice of clothes, have easy to use rackets and attend classes with much more interesting instructional methods. U.S. Tennis and the industry have spent lots of money getting kids to try out the sport. And yet, ball sales are down and it is easy to find an open tennis court.

When I see a sport like tennis—with the money, role models and built-in fun—fail to reverse the trend, it worries me about the prospects for such hard-work sports as running, swimming and bicycling. And these sports each have their additional challenges. For example, U.S. Swimming's magazine Splash had a recent article on the struggle against male body embarrassment to keep boys in the sport. It seems that boys do not like to wear speedos and they hate to be beaten by girls (who develop earlier). Bicycling has safety and equipment costs. Running has soccer and now lacrosse pulling prime athletes away.

If you take it as a given that we are trying to swim upstream by improving elite performance while the number of entering athletes declines, the strategies change from an earlier era that had an abundance of kids willing to try our sports. In that earlier era, you could have a whole range of coaching from early high-intensity to a more gentle approach through all of the teen years. It did not matter much in developing a high number of elite athletes because so many entered the fray. From an elite athlete production viewpoint, we did not have to worry about the burnout rate (I agree with Scott Molina that this is mostly a psychological issue).

However, with fewer highly talented kids, indeed fewer participating kids period, the coaching and career development have to be smarter. Coaches should take as great care of their young charges (much as Mel Gibson took care of his gasoline in Mad Max). Indeed, coaches should adopt the Hippocratic oath—first, do no harm. This, of course, should have been the creed even back in our heyday of the 60s and 70s, but the macro-impact of a careless approach to coaching was not felt because of the sheer volume of talented kids.

This argues against high volume, especially at young ages. It argues for keeping the sports as fun as possible while still providing enough work so that the talented kids can begin to shine. When they start to shine, that is when they will get motivated and become passionate about their sport. Steady increases in volume then lead to improved performances.

It is exactly backwards to start with a strategy of higher volume. Volume in endurance sports means more work. Work is the opposite of fun for kids. Peruse any one of the many books out on the problems in youth sports, such as Why Johnny Hates Sports, and the number one reason kids give for dropping a sport is that it ceased to be fun and there was too much adult pressure.

What's more, in running higher volume at younger ages (including through high school graduation) provides no career development benefit. (To a certain degree I believe the same holds true for bicycling and swimming). The goal in running is not to have teenagers breaking 4-minutes for the mile; it is to have men breaking 3:50 for the mile. Take two identically talented kids, A and B. Train A at the maximum mileage possible from the time he is 9 or 10, all the way through high school. B is physically active but does a variety of other sports and dabbles at running until high school. You put them in the same high school program, and B's talent will emerge and he will match A's performances within one season. All of that work that A has done before high school will not give him an edge over B. In fact, A is far worse off because he has been exposed to much higher risk levels of injury and psychological burnout.

The same holds true if you delay high mileage until after high school. The lesser-trained athlete B will catch up with the heavier-trained athlete A within a year or so. Because of the burnout and injury risk to A, athlete B is much more likely to be the one who becomes an Olympic athlete.

With bicycling and swimming you have technique and muscle development issues that will take athlete B more time to catch up with athlete A, which is why those sports require some degree of volume to stay competitive. But taking a "world-class or bust" approach to training kids will work against the long-term goal of having top adult endurance athletes. There are plenty of other things for kids to do if they decide they hate swimming, bicycling or running. Madden Football and its enticing friends will remain the biggest competitors our kids will ever have in the race to develop American endurance talent.