Welcome back to The Signal, our Wednesday column that identifies the trends and reveals the insights that are changing the sports we love. Today, we’re talking to author David Epstein, author of Range and Inside the Box, about the parallels between Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and US Open finalist Ben Shelton and why the best way to become great at a single sport might be to play a lot of them.
Patrick Mahomes has described football as his “last sport.”
Before he settled into mastering the intricacies of the QB position during his junior and senior years of high school, Mahomes’ focus was on basketball and baseball. In his senior year at Whitehouse High in Texas, he threw for 4,619 yards and 50 touchdowns, but he also had a no-hitter with 16 strikeouts and a fastball in the mid-90s.
In corporate America, playing multiple sports is the equivalent of a rotational program for recent college graduates, where employees develop a variety of skills for a period of time before settling on a permanent role.
Raised by a father who was a Major League pitcher, Mahomes played whatever sport was in season when he was a kid. He wasn’t a part of the 20% of youth who played travel ball. Instead, he played the standard rec ball that likely handed out a lot of participation trophies.
On Monday night, the three-time Super Bowl champion began his 10th NFL season with the Kansas City Chiefs. Coming off a torn ACL and LCL in his left knee that ended his 2025 season, the two-time league MVP had some exciting plays in a solid performance, completing 15 of 27 passes for two touchdowns and one interception in a Chiefs’ 31-10 victory over the Denver Broncos.
But we shouldn’t be surprised by Mahomes’ success. And it’s not all because he’s a great athlete who can make spectacular plays out of nothing behind a future Hall of Fame coach and a stellar supporting cast of receivers, running backs and offensive linemen. Late specializers—generalists who find a personal fit later in their development rather than focusing on something very early—perform well as NFL quarterbacks.
This trend of late specialists surpassing early prodigies shows up across all sports and in all walks of life, from mathematicians to chess players and from jazz guitarists to painters.
The breakout star of the 2026 US Open, Ben Shelton, has a lot in common with Mahomes. Shelton’s father was a former tennis pro and a successful tennis coach, but he didn’t pressure his son to specialize in tennis at a young age. Shelton played baseball and football (Mahomes was one of his heroes), and he didn’t give up football to focus on tennis until age 12, much later than many of his competitors at Flushing Meadows.
Author David Epstein has spent a decade studying how elite performers develop, which is the subject of his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. (He’s also written The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance and the new Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better.) In an exclusive interview with Box Score, Epstein called Shelton “a classic Range case.”
“[Shelton] had an early sampling period where he played a lot of sports, including football until about the age 12 when he started to focus on tennis,” Epstein said. “That’s quite late by elite tennis standards.”
In Range, Epstein explains how many elite athletes have had a similar phase in their youth where they play a variety of sports and “gain a range of physical proficiency from which they can draw.” Shelton credits football and baseball with helping to develop the athleticism and hand-eye coordination that propelled him to the US Open final.
“The science shows that if you play about three different attacking sports where you have to judge bodies or balls before about the age of 12, then you can more quickly pick up other subsequent skills,” Epstein said. “So there is a learning advantage and it’s really important to do that sampling before age 12.”
That the fathers of both Mahomes and Shelton were accomplished athletes in their own right may have also helped their sons avoid specializing in a single sport too young because many elite athletes reject early specialization. A 2017 study found that 63.4% of Major League players believe that early sport specialization was not required to play professional baseball. Pat Mahomes Sr. is certainly one of them.
For Bryan Shelton, the resistance to early specialization is even more telling, Epstein said, because he was a successful tennis coach, winning a women’s NCAA championship at Georgia Tech and a men’s NCAA championship at Florida. He clearly saw his son’s talent yet did not encourage him to specialize before age 12. The Sheltons remind Epstein of another elite tennis player with a tennis coach parent.
“It’s kind of like Roger Federer, where his mother was a tennis coach, but she declined to coach him at one point because he wanted to be more free form and not return balls normally and have fun,” Esptein said. “So again the potential was sitting right there in front of [Bryan Shelton] and he didn’t do it and came back later.”
Another benefit of late specialization is avoiding injuries. A 2022 systematic review of academic research on athlete specialization found that athletes in most sports demonstrate better performance after youth multisport engagement, and that youth sports specialization is linked with increased injury risk in athletes at the highest levels of competition.
“There is a negative correlation between things that predict youth success and adult success,” Epstein said. “It sounds like [Shelton] sampled tennis until he wanted to do it seriously, rather than following the family path. But exposure is good. It’s early specialization that is the problem. When you diversify you get the benefit of match quality, where a kid gets to pick something they like and are good at. Second, you get injury resistance. We’re not sure why, but when you diversify your movement patterns you become more resistant to injury. No one knows for sure. And third, you have this learning advantage as if you grew up speaking many languages.”
These insights apply beyond sports. In a recent video on his YouTube channel, Epstein shows that Nobel Prize winners initially progress more slowly than their peers, get tenure later and publish less frequently when they’re younger. He believes that’s because they adopt a broader and more interdisciplinary approach early in their careers, not unlike Patrick Mahomes with a basketball and Ben Shelton with a football.
So don’t be discouraged if you don’t race to the top in your own career. The evidence shows that a generalized approach can improve your physical and cognitive abilities, and sampling different fields and roles can help you understand yourself better to identify the career that best matches your abilities and interests. Whether your goal is the NFL, medical school or the C-suite, it’s never too early to be a late specialist. 🏈
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