Here we are nearing the end of the school year and some sports are taking a breather for the summer. I say some, because the majority of them are gearing up for their summer seasons not really allowing the athletes to take time off, heal and then prepare for the following season or even pick up other sports to learn new skills and have fun. I’m not sure when it happened, but once youth sports organizations figured out they could make money year round we all decided to throw out every bit of data we have about specializing and year round sports in favor of playing our favorite sport 11.5 months out of the year. There’s a TON of information out there about how detrimental this can be, but if you’re not spending money with your chosen organization out of the season then GOOD LUCK making the team next year. On top of that parents have been CONVINCED that if they’re not practicing and training in their sport all year, they’ll be left behind as their children get older. I’m going to lay out my case here, and I’m hoping that at least a small percentage of the parents reading this will take a harder look at what they’re putting their children through when they decide to invest more time, energy and money into out of season athletic endeavors and specializing in sport.

Youth Sports is a Business, and Don’t Forget It

Collectively, youth sports generate around $19 BILLION dollars per year (as of 2019) and is expected to grow to roughly 77.6 billion dollars per year by the year 2026 if projections based on the past decade are correct. From 2010 to 2017, youth sports saw a 55% increase in revenue so we can most likely hypothesize that around that time is when this big push for year round sports started on a grand scale. You don’t see a 55% increase in that short a timeframe, unless you’re adding in more time (about double) on the field of play. Coincidentally that timeframe runs right in line with the explosion of sports performance facilities like The Lyons Den across the country and in addition to that, this is when we started seeing the boom in sports related non contact soft tissue injuries in young athletes. Sports organizations saw what was happening and decided they didn’t want to miss out on the cash so everyone jumped on the bandwagon and now we have year round sports at even intermediate levels of competition. Now it’s true that recreational sports have basically been year round endeavors for a long time, but rec sports are about fun and learning how to enjoy the game. It isn’t as intense, it isn’t full of private instruction on top of practices, and while practicing and playing can wear you out it isn’t even close to on the same level as 2 hour practices three to four times per week with travel and 5-6 game tournaments on the weekends. There’s all the difference in the world between recreational sports, and travel/club/competitive sports.

Youth sports organizations have lost their collective minds in the past decade. We have pee wee and 14U teams with their own locker rooms (something that was reserved for HIGH level athletics like college and pro in the past), teams make bobble heads and player cards for their rostered players, families have to sign what amounts to loyalty pledges to organizations and families even sign checks worth tens of thousands of dollars to organizations with the promise of their child developing and moving on to the next level. We’ve created travel/club leagues and organizations for kids barely up to par and while I think it’s awesome that more kids are going to be able to experience these sports it’s mostly just inflating the pockets of these organizations.

The sport I grew up playing has a major problem right now down here in Florida. Hockey has three different tiers of competition in what’s called “travel hockey” which would be similar to club soccer or volleyball. You have AAA which is at the very top, then AA below that and at the bottom we have A which is meant to act as a developmental league for kids who are too good to play rec and need more of a challenge but aren’t quite there yet. In 2020, SAHOF (Statewide Amateur Hockey of Florida) decided that within the A hockey division they were going to create another tier and have A1 and A2. On the surface this sounds great! More kids get to play travel hockey which means more kids get to experience this wonderful sport at a higher level. In practice what this was is another way to generate revenue for organizations. Now I’m not saying kids should be boxed out of playing travel hockey, but I am saying that for the HIGHEST levels of competition for amateur hockey players in the state of Florida, the bar should probably be a little bit higher.

You’re probably sitting there saying “But Coach Connor, why can’t these kids play as well and this sounds like a good thing” and you’re not completely wrong, however the typical costs of travel hockey outweigh recreational “in-house” hockey leagues by a margin of 4:1. If we can convince these kids that they’re good enough to play travel hockey before they’re really ready, we can squeeze a few thousand more out of them every year. When you play travel hockey you’re not just paying league dues, you’re paying for team apparel, travel, more practice ice, coaches fees, etc. In addition to that, kids that play travel hockey and their families are more invested in the sport itself leading to further revenue streams down the road as kids will stay in the sport with the hopes of making it to the next level. Now, there’s nothing wrong with giving kids an opportunity because maybe this extra ice and practice will lead to the development of a few kids who otherwise wouldn't have gotten these opportunities. But when these kids hit 15/16U, these A1 and A2 are no longer available and kids will be left to the side anyways. These organizations just want to squeeze as much money out of the consumer as possible before they’re tossed to the side. While I see this as a money grab, I honestly can’t blame these organizations as they’re offering a service that the market is asking for. This is the consumer driving the market, but as consumers we need to be more educated when it comes to long term outcomes for the children involved.

Youth sports organizations have built professional level amenities for these young athletes in an effort to woo them to their programs, and all of these amenities cost money. Year round sports have created the budgets which help build and maintain these amenities. We have coaches for higher level youth athletics pocketing six figures and parents on boards for organizations making decisions based on politics and selling spots on rosters to the highest bidders. Youth sports is a business today, and while there definitely are people within these organizations that want to get the best out of your kids and set them up for success, it’s still a business and the vast majority of decisions are based on that fact.

The Politics of It All

If you have a kid playing sports, then you’ve undoubtably come across some level of politics in the game. It could be that your kid lost out on a roster spot to a kid who’s dad was the coach, or who’s parent was the team manager, or maybe to a kid who’s parents made a nice sized donation to the organization. Hell back when I was playing (and again when I was coaching) I watched roster spots go to kid’s whose moms were a little bit, overly friendly we’ll say, with the coach. It happens in every sport, at every level, in every city across the country. I’ve seen it with kids that I coach in the gym and while it’s sad to see them so disappointed after working so hard, all you can really do is tell them to shrug it off and get to work so they can make the coach’s job of cutting them next year impossible. But it doesn’t stop here, part of the insanity of year round sports is the politics of boxing kids out who don’t do your “off season training.” Organizations, facilities and coaches have to keep cash flowing year round to support and pay for the facilities they build for these kids. I’ll start off with another example from hockey since I’ve been involved in the sport for the past two decades:

I’ve got a lot of kids I work with who play the sport of hockey. My background is in the sport, I played it at a high level and I’ve coached it at the highest levels off the ice. So, while I do well with all sports and have worked with all of them at the highest levels, I’ve got a “name” in the sport of hockey nationally so we get a ton of hockey players. Every May these kids hit the tryout circuit in hopes of making one of the local travel teams and there’s three things that dictate whether or not they end up making the teams under these organizations:

1 - Did they play for this organization last season?

2 - Did they pay to do this organization’s “spring travel training”?

3 - Did they pay the head coach of said team to do private skills training on the ice, and if so how frequently?

Now don’t get me wrong, if you’re a stud and you stand out in try outs you’ll have your choice of team to play for, BUT if you’re only above average/pretty good the above three can be deal breakers. How much money you spend with an organization plays a HUGE role in whether or not your child will end up on a roster come the fall. The private training aspect is huge as well, there’s a running joke about a local coach that if you don’t spend enough money on privates with him, you absolutely 100% won’t make his team. Kids know it, parents know it, everybody knows it. I’ve also got a few kids I work with who were doing three different organizations “spring travel training” and skating 5 nights a week in their offseason because they wanted to hedge their bets come tryout season. My last year working at a hockey facility, there was TWO DAYS off before Spring Travel Training started, teams finished their season on a Sunday and started their training on the ice on Tuesday. That isn’t NEARLY enough time off and down the road these kids are going to feel these decisions made by these organizations.

Now the above scenario wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if playing a sport year round wasn’t detrimental to the development of the athlete, but we know with all the data out there that if you play the same sport year round long enough that the wheels are eventually gonna fall off. There’s an old saying in the hockey community and it goes “there’s no such thing as bad ice.” This is a relic from back when there was only five sheets of ice down here in Tampa, and was meant to point out with limited options, and any time that you could get your child on the ice was a good time no matter the instruction. Well, we now have 18 sheets of ice spread out from Ellenton to Lakeland, and Clearwater to Wesley Chapel if you include Amalie and 2 privately owned sheets on residential properties, there are PLENTY of options to get your kid on the ice so I think it’s time to throw that saying in the trash, where it’s always belonged. You don’t have to play year round to develop, you have to play year round to support these organizations and have the opportunity to play during the season. This absolutely isn’t limited to hockey, I have athletes of all sports who go through this. From Summer football conditioning (you need 3 months of conditioning??) to the 17 different seasons baseball and lacrosse have and hockey spring and summer leagues there’s entirely too much being offered and it’s to the detriment of your child’s development.

Politics and “pay to have a chance to play” have taken over youth sports, and to be completely honest I’m not sure what the answer is. These facilities can’t get by on in season dues alone, and if you want your kid to continue to have a place to play you need to frequent these organizations/facilities but if you allow them to play year round, they’ll eventually burn out or get hurt. From loyalty pledges with organizations who would drop your child in a second if something better came along, to offseason training on the field of play, youth sports has a serious problem on its hands.

Organization Offered Performance Training

One of the many ways sports organizations try to gain extra revenue is to offer off the field/ice training for their athletes. It’s more of a time investment on the athlete’s and parent’s part but it’s a great way to gain extra money and give the consumer more perceived value for their money and let’s face it, sports performance training isn’t cheap and an economic option for families seems like a good thing. But here’s the thing: I’ve worked at quite a few facilities throughout my 13 year career. Some that were stand alone performance facilities/gyms, and some that were a part of bigger sports training facilities. The stand alone performance facilities operate drastically differently from the sports performance departments inside of sports training facilities. The sports performance departments located inside of sports training facilities that I’ve worked at used sports performance as an “extra” to add to their overall training experience for your child, whereas the stand alone facilities/gyms were there to train first and chased outcomes over dollars because outcomes eventually lead to dollars. You’re probably not going to want to hear this as a parent, but when your sports organization offers off the field/court/ice training, it’s typically INCREDIBLY subpar (unless they hire it out) and typically run by people who really don’t know what they’re doing. The goal isn’t to make your child better for the field of play, it’s to add perceived value to the overall experience that you’ll get with that organization in an effort to grab more of your dollars. Outcomes don’t matter, and I’ve even worked at places that would either use sport coaches for this who did it for free, or they’d pay some kid $15-20 an hour to run your kids through cone obstacle courses and make them tired. These facilities act as a money middle man, skim their cash off the top and hand your kids over to people who are completely unqualified to work with them. It sounds great on paper and you’re getting more for your money right? Not so fast.

The majority of sport coaches are ignorant to a few things:

1. Training should not look like their sport. In fact in a lot of ways it should be giving these athletes what they’re not getting on the field of play and should be “the opposite” of there movements on the field of play. Training too specific to sport will lead to overuse injuries and time lost on the field of play.

2. Conditioning is a waste of everyone’s time. Their sport practice and game play should take care of this, but when coaches are in charge of the on the field and off the field preparation, they inevitably will condition the kids off the field of play because it’s easy and what they know. This is an exercise in futility and a waste of everyone’s time and money and will eventually lead to these kids getting hurt.

3. Agility is not what you think it is. Agility is not fast feet, running around obstacles, etc. it is the ability to accelerate, decelerate and reaccelerate the hips and torso. Typical agility training doesn’t accomplish anything outside of making your athletes tired and really good at pre-sequenced obstacle courses. If your coach is talking about agility and not including strength training, they’re missing the mark.

The reason I’m bringing this topic up is because it’s another way organizations box your kids into training for sport year round. And to be fair a lot of times these things are offered with the best of intentions as they really believe that they’re helping your kids, but in reality they’re hurting your kids in the long run. Believe it or not, a lot of your off the field training is leading to overuse/soft tissue injuries. When you place your kids in the hands of sport coaches to run their off the field work, you’re giving them to a person who thinks their training needs to look like their sport and that’s a recipe for disaster. I won’t go into the details but I’ve watched it first hand at a few of the facilities I’ve worked at. They’ll use a sport coach or even hire someone who’s played the sport in the past in an effort to offer more things to the consumer and create perceived value and keep your dollars coming in during the off season.

You’ve read the wording perceived value a few times in this article, and the reason I’m using it so frequently is because I’ve sat in meetings where this exact verbiage was used. The people at the top legit didn’t care about the development of your child, they just wanted you to think you’re getting more for your money so they could increase their bottom line. I worked at a facility where we would help out with the on site camps during the summer and they paid our department a whopping $0.55 per kid per week. We were not part of these negotiations, we were strong armed into this payout by people a lot more important than us. There were about 200 kids in any given week and they were split up into 6 different groups that trained for about 50 minutes per day with our department. So we needed to have someone for 6 hours per day who could work with them, and if you do the math you’ll see that it comes out to roughly $3.67 per hour that our department was getting for this time. The director at the time was making about $50 an hour, I was making about $27 an hour as the associate director, and the number three guy was making roughly $22 an hour. If we put someone knowledgable with these kids we’d be looking at a $19-46 loss for every hour ($570-1350 per week) we worked with these kids. So what did we do? We had to stick to a budget, and we had to make this work. So, we hired an intern who made $1000 a month stipend who had no experience so we would only see a $2 loss per hour that could be made up on our end by bringing in more clientele. We were a world renowned sports performance facility with incredibly high end clientele, and having us on the schedule brought in more cash to the camps. But the facility put us into a position where they didn’t get our training because they wanted to add perceived value, not actual value. That wasn’t the only facility I worked at that did this either, it’s extremely common in the youth sports world so just be aware of it. Not all off the field training is equal, and just because a coach has good intentions doesn’t mean that it’s going to be beneficial to your child. It could actually be detrimental to your child and you could see time lost due to injury.

Try not to fall into the trap of buying into a program/organization because of their off the field training schedule. Find out who’s going to be running it, their background and their injury reports and make sure that someone QUALIFIED to work with your kids is going to be working with them.

Downfalls of Year Round Playing

We’ve established that development is on the forefront of the minds of most parents, and that development makes the game more fun for kids. But there has to be a balance to this equation and time away from the field of play is part of this equation. There’s a few reasons for this ranging from mental/emotional reasons to physical and physiological reasons. We’ll start off by listing the mental/emotional aspects of year round training:

• Kid’s get burnt out

  • I get it. Your kid LOVES to play the sport, but when it’s every single day it will inevitably lead to a good portion of kids getting burnt out and quitting. When I was at the Athletes Compound inside of Saddlebrook working with the academy kids they played their sport 5+ hours per day. Many kids quit before graduating high school and the ones who made it to the college level, many of them quit after the first year. Too much structure early on lead them to not having social lives and when they got to college they FINALLY had some time for themselves (sports cannot go year round at the NCAA level according to the rules). They had social lives for the first time in their lives and decided tennis was no longer for them and quit.

• Pressure becomes incredibly high on their young bodies and brains

  • Kids aren’t stupid. They understand the sacrifices you make as a parent so that they can play their sports. We constantly joke about how expensive sports are and kids pick up on that. Dumping ungodly amounts of time and money into sports wears on kids, and it puts a TON of pressure on them. Peeling back the time and financial commitment can lead to better outcomes.

• Performance becomes incredibly inconsistent

  • The above two reasons lead to inconsistent outcomes on the field of play. Being burnt out, injured, and mentally exhausted changes our readiness for the field of play and you’ll start to see kids fall off as they get older because of this.

• Feelings of missing out on life

  • As your kids get older, they’re going to have to sacrifice important things to continue playing the sports they love. I missed my senior prom to attend training camp for Team Florida’s preparation for the Chicago Showcase back in 2003. I almost missed my graduation because I was recovering from hernia surgery that was scheduled so I could be ready to attend summer camps for various junior hockey programs. You’re going to miss some things if you play your sport year round, it’s just a fact. While there’s something to be said for being “all in” when it comes to your development in sport, these kinds of things can take a toll on young athletes and can leave them thinking about quitting.

The above are the main reasons year round sports can be emotionally draining for young kids. From pressure, to being completely burnt out on the sport there’s a lot of mental fatigue that can coincide with year round sports. Now that we’ve mentioned the emotional aspects, let’s take a look at the physiological/physical downfalls of year round sports and early specialization:

• Increased Rate of Injury

  • Playing the same sport with the same movement patterns and the same loads and the same energy systems all year long is going to take a toll on your body. We’re not even talking about the damage from contact sports, we’re talking about the plethora of overuse injuries seen by young athletes due to their volume of playing. We’re seeing kids in HIGH SCHOOL getting Tommy John surgery, that used to be reserved for pitchers well into their MLB careers. The body needs different stimuli to develop, and to maintain normal bodily function. Too much of anything is bad, and when you accompany this constant playing with a lack of development in the gym you’re asking for a disaster to occur.

• Immediate Skill Improvements Followed by a Long Plateau

  • We get immediate adaptation from specializing. On the surface this sounds like a good thing, however skill acquisition is best done slow cooked. Focusing on one set of movement skill and sport skill while neglecting overall athletic development will lead to a scenario where your peers will eventually catch you and surpass you later in your youth career.

• Best Performances Early on in Youth Career

  • How many times have you heard of the kid who was an absolute phenom at 10/12U never really make much of a splash at the higher levels? This is due to early adaptation of sport skill, other kids just can’t keep up early on. But this continued focus on the sport while neglecting overall movement skill and strength development will lead to you playing your best games when you’re 13/14 years old.

Whichever tense you look at this through, year round playing and specializing in a single sport at a young age is no bueno for your developing child. It won’t just hurt their playing prospects, but it would probably be nice if they don’t have nagging orthopedic issues well into adulthood that began when they were 10-15 years old.

TAKE. SOME. TIME. OFF!

While I understand love of sport and wanting to be out on the field/ice as often as humanly possible we all need to do better for these kids. The excuses seem to be never ending, but the following are the ones I tend to hear most often:

• “But my child LOVES to play”

  • That’s awesome! However, I’m sure your kid would also love to eat pizza and ice cream for dinner every night. Are you going to allow them to do something that’s unhealthy for them just because they love it? While it’s not perceived to be a bad thing, playing one sport all year long is incredibly unhealthy for developing minds and bodies.

• “We don’t want to get left behind”

  • They won’t. Over 80% of NCAA DI football scholarships went to kids who played more than one sport in high school. Playing other sports helps round an athlete out, leads to better problem solving and increases longevity in sport.

• “He/She’s trying to get a scholarship”

  • I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but scholarships are INCREDIBLY hard to come by. The full rides at least. Here’s a breakdown of the numbers by sport per school for the more popular sports:

    • NCAA DI Baseball: 11.7 scholarships for 27 roster spots

    • NCAA DI Hockey: 18 scholarships for 25-28 roster spots

    • NCAA DI Football: 85 full/partial scholarships (25 per class)

    • NCAA DI Basketball: 13 scholarships for 15 roster spots

    • NCAA DI Volleyball: 12 scholarships for 15 roster spots (teams can carry more athletes but can only travel with 15)

  • The above are the maximum for the sports listed. Not all schools have the funds to hand out that many scholarships and the Ivy League teams don’t offer any. You’ll spend more money trying to get a scholarship than you’ll ever see on the backend. Most kids are going to end up at DIII schools where your academics will play a much larger role, because they do not offer athletic scholarships.

• “But *insert high level athlete* played every day growing up and they’re fine! They wouldn’t have made it if they didn’t practice every single day”

  • They’re where they are because they’re genetic freaks. They’re the 0.1%, you can’t justify year round sports by using the exception. For every Sidney Crosby, there’s 100,000 who never made it. They’re at the highest level in spite of how they did it, not because of what they did. Dedication to one’s craft is a great thing, but you need to look at the totality of all of it.

Specializing at an early age and playing that sport all year long will hurt your child in the long run. We need to take time away from the field of play not only for their bodies to heal, but to allow them to miss the sport! Try to take a step back and look at the totality of the road ahead of you, and you’ll more than likely see that missing two months of playing a sport isn’t going to be the end of the world.