There is no such thing as an elite youth athlete.
There I said it, and I’m not taking it back!
You might assume that I enjoy being a keyboard warrior, but this is not the case.
I have spent a vast majority of my life talking to parents about their athletes. And my opinion on the matter has not changed very much over the years. If you have a young kid who is excelling at sports, that’s good. However, it is a poor indicator as to where they are going to end up later in life.
Early Bloomers
Let me give you an example from my childhood.
Baseball was my favorite sport. I would still say that baseball is my favorite… However, hockey is coming in fast and might take that number one spot here soon.
I digress…
When I was twelve, there was a kid in the area who threw the ball very hard. To protect this dude’s identity, we’re going to call him Steve.
Steve was that 12-year-old kid who had a full goatee and it looked like he had two kids and a mortgage to pay for. To be honest, when I faced him the very first time, I thought it was someone’s dad that was pitching to us. Nope, it was just Steve.
He is what people refer to now as an elite youth athlete. He developed a little bit earlier than everyone else. So his abilities seemed fast-forwarded almost. The rest of the county seemed to be playing catch-up to this cat. Going into high school, he was considered an up-and-coming player.
As Steve got into his upperclassmen years, he was barely throwing 78 mph and was probably our fourth-best pitcher on the team by the time he graduated.
Where we are now is not where we end up.
This aforementioned story still happens to this very day. We have had kids start at the gym who were 5′ tall and now they’re over 6′ tall. We have had kids that can barely get off the floor when they jump for the first time and now they have a 35″ vertical and so on and so on.
We have seen the inverse as well.
Kids who come into the gym that have a very high absolute strength level, have good kinesthetics, proprioception and if they keep going, can turn themselves into a pretty good athlete.
A lot of those kids have things that come to them very easily. And when something comes to you fairly easily, it’s very difficult to want to work even harder for something. A lot of those talented kids think they reach a certain point or are told they are “elite” and don’t need to do as much coaching or training.
When that happens, your average kids who are working very hard behind the scenes pass them.
We see it every single year. And it is those average kids who end up going further than the most talented youth athletes of the area.
There is a difference between knowing the basics and doing the basics.
I received a text message from a mother of a former client of ours. After a couple text messages of catching up, she informed me that her son had made some “high-level travel teams”.
Keep in mind, this kid is 15 years old.
We started talking about the next steps to transition him into training at our facility again. Usually, it’s an assessment so that we can program appropriately and then progress from there.
She said, “My son does not need to be working out in groups with other kids because he has moved past group training and basic training altogether.”
This is an actual quote that I have copied and pasted into this text field that I am blogging on.
I will spare you the rest of the conversation, but I will tell you what I was thinking in my head.
Let’s say that this young man is an exceptional 15-year-old athlete and let’s say that he does have the potential to make it to the next level of athletics. That does not mean that he has to run a “high-level” strength and conditioning program.
I’ve had professional athletes come into the gym that can barely do one chin-up. A vast majority of our youth athletes come to the gym and can’t even do a push-up. But since some of these kids are making “elite teams,” we are supposed to be training them as such?
Doing the basics and knowing the basics are two completely different things. At the gym, we hammer the basics until that well runs dry. And for that well to run dry, it takes years and years and years of adaptations to have to progress past “basic”. Just because you are operating at a “high level” does not mean you are too good to perform the basics and to perform the basics well.
The reason we’ve had such great success with our youth population is because we make them do basic things every single day for years. We know that if they can master the basics, anything else is going to become very easy.
In summary
I will save you my rants on the travel sports industry and focus more on improving youth athletic development. Buzzwords like ‘elite’ make kids and parents feel good that their 8-year-old is able to compete in these leagues. The studies and numbers show that a vast majority of these kids are not college-bound for athletics. Instead, it is the children that are developing a little bit later that make up a bulk of those college athlete pools.
What I want people to take away from this mini rant is that the basics are necessary. The basics are necessary for years. The basics are necessary for professional athletes, middle school athletes, high school athletes, and every level of athletics in the world. The only way to truly develop an individual to elite status is to master the basics for a certain length of time. Athletes have to continually have their bodies undergo adaptations to the point where they can sustain a more advanced level of programming.
