List of multi-sport athletes

A multi-sport athlete is an athlete who competes or trains two or more different sports. Most of these athletes played two or more sports from a young age – especially in high school – before deciding to usually concentrate on just one sport professionally.

Playing multiple sports appears to improve performance through development of foundational transferable athletic skills. A large majority of elite young adult athletes, such as NCAA Division I athletes and first-round NFL draft picks, were multi-sport athletes, even if they specialized in a single sport during their professional career, and many played multiple sports even through the end of high school. Most elite athletes who eventually specialized avoided early sports specialization, so they did not specialize or begin intensive training until they were older teenagers. Elite athletes in most sports, such as track and field, weightlifting, cycling, rowing, swimming, skiing, are less likely to have done intensive training at a young age than the near-elite athletes. NCAA Division I athletes tended to play multiple sports in high school, and only one in six specialized in a single sport before the age of 12. In the 2015 NFL Scouting Combine, six out of seven invited college athletes were multi-sport athletes in high school.