Year-round sports have at least three advantages. First, they allow you to maintain reasonable proficiency without having to break into your sport again when the proper season comes around.

  

You always have the fundamentals and skills at hand without the usual re-education lag. Second, expenses for equipment will necessarily be minimized if you limit the number of sports you engage in.

 

This saves time for the busy person and money for the man with more pressing responsibilities. Imagine the expense of the country club, the hunting lodge, and the summer cottage, to enjoy these outlets.

 

The year-round sport fits like an old and welcome shoe—you can slip into it and enjoy it whenever you want. Winter, summer, day and night are all alike. And you do not take the risk of seasonal switches from a sport requiring one pattern of effort to another requiring different motions and rhythms. Tennis in the summer is indeed poor preparation for skiing in the winter.

 

This comment is made in the interest of safety and prevention of injury. Many people are good tennis players and good skiers. But the transition from tennis to skiing, unless both are approached in a most desultory fashion, will produce a predicted biennial series of Charley horses, strained backs, and paralyzed shoulders. The next time you  need a good chuckle, visit your neighbor the day after his first game of “catch” with his baseball-minded son in early spring or the day after the ice has frozen and he has shown his daughter how we used to skate “in the good old days.”

 

However, to ignore seasonal sports is as senseless as to enjoy them exclusively. Dreary indeed would be the enthusiast of one sport who did not take advantage of the excitement and availability of the more seasonal activities.

 

Perhaps there are some who toil diligently and profitably at weight lifting in the cellar or in the YMCA for the full yearly twelve months. Marvelous. But to this bread-and-butter regimen should be appended other diversified and accessible seasonal sports. Skiing, skating, tennis, “catch,” hiking, bicycling, swimming, touch football with Junior—several may be available and are indigenous activities which should not be missed by the true sportsman.

 

I know many Olympic athletes who are obviously world-class competitors in their own specialties. But they know nothing else in sports. For them the forest does not exist because it is all trees!

 

Finally, some sports appear to be seasonal, but are not. Swimming in an indoor pool may not be as much fun as swimming outdoors but is just as much exercise. Track in the winter differs from track in the summer mainly in the extra clothes needed. The same goes for bicycling, hiking, and mountain climbing.

 

Covered tennis courts are available, making this sport much less seasonal. Skating rinks of artificial ice greatly extend “winter” for the skating devotee. Gymnasiums, of course, provide twelve months’ service for basketball, fencing, calisthenics, and other undercover activities. The sensible person selects a basic staple for his athletic diet but also enjoys varied seasonal desserts.