If you search "How to be a good hockey player" in Google, the very first page, at least when I searched, was a WikiHow that emphasizes starting young above every thing else. It says, "The younger, the better. There's a definite pattern — the better hockey players are the ones that started earlier", and its true, most players that end up in the NHL began hockey between ages 3 and 6.
While it's true that this extreme commitment may make people better players, I'm not sure it's the best thing for all the kids that are involved. Once you are in high school there must be a balance between school and sports. The kids on Team USA u18 in Minnesota practice daily from 2 o'clock in the afternoon to late at night. Their lives become centered around hockey, but the sad thing is most people will not ever be able to make a career out of their sports passions. As Ken Campbell of ESPN says, you have "a better chance of winning the Powerball or 6-49 lotteries than [you do] of becoming an NHL player." Then more surprising, those people who succeed greatly on Junior or College teams have less than a 5 percent chance of becoming professional.
I feel bad for a lot of the prospect athletes in the US who center their lives around a sport. Most give up a lot but end up not being rewarded for their efforts. In fact just by being born in America you chances are far lower than if you were born a few hours further north in Canada. I believe that sports are a great part of life, but it is wrong for parents, because it is due to them that their 4 year old is in a rigorous athletics program, to invest their kids lives in such an exclusive profession. Many people believe that they will be the one lucky person to get a spot on a team making millions each year, and a few will, but countless others will end up in more normal careers with their dreams left unachieved.
This is something I have also noticed - even in "nerd sports" like Science Olympiad, where you cannot even actually make a career out of it - people who start earlier do better. And more and more people are starting to spend their weekends taking tests in sixth grade for fun. I think there is a growing sense that if you don't start doing an activity early on you cannot do it at all - a lot of my friends have expressed regret that they "cannot" do an activity because they haven't done it before. This seems unfortunate to me, but perhaps an inevitable result of increased competitiveness.
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