Playing vs. Preparing: Why Athletes Need Both

Every August, almost like clockwork, we start having the same conversations with parents….

School is starting. Practices are picking up. Games are right around the corner. The calendar that had a little breathing room during the summer suddenly gets packed, and one of the first things families start looking to remove is training.

“He’s practicing five days a week now. He’s getting plenty.”

I completely understand why parents think that way. Your kid goes to school all day, heads straight to practice, gets home late, eats dinner, does homework and has to get up and do it again tomorrow. Add games or tournaments on the weekend and the last thing most parents are looking for is another place they need to drive.

But there’s something we’ve learned after years of working with young athletes that I think is really important for parents to understand.

Playing your sport and preparing your body to play your sport are not the same thing.

They both matter. In fact, if you want to become a great athlete, you probably need a lot of both. The mistake is assuming that because an athlete is doing more of one, they’re automatically getting the benefits of the other.

That distinction becomes even more important when we stop looking at what an athlete needs for this Saturday and start thinking about who that athlete could become three, five or even ten years from now.

Practice Has a Job. Training Has a Job.

Baseball is probably the easiest example for us because we work with so many baseball players.

If you want to become a great hitter, you have to hit. There is no exercise we’re going to do at Crucible that replaces seeing a fastball, recognizing a breaking ball or standing in the box with two strikes against someone who is actively trying to get you out.

You need at-bats. You need reps. You need coaching. You need to learn timing and mechanics, make adjustments and actually play the game.

Strength training can’t replace any of that.

But the opposite is also true.

Taking another 500 swings isn’t necessarily going to make you faster. Playing six games this weekend isn’t a progressive strength program. Throwing more innings doesn’t automatically develop the physical capacity needed to tolerate throwing more innings.

That’s where preparation comes in.

Strength training, speed development, power work and movement training develop the physical qualities underneath the sport. They aren’t replacements for practicing your sport. They give you more physical ability to bring to it.

We talk about this with our athletes all the time:

Sport creates demand. Training builds capacity.

The research around long-term athletic development supports that distinction. The National Strength and Conditioning Association recommends that youth development include foundational muscular strength, motor skills, physical literacy and the broad development of athleticism as kids grow and mature.

In other words, simply participating in a sport shouldn’t be confused with developing every physical quality that sport eventually requires.

We’ve Watched the Start-and-Stop Cycle for Years

This is the part that concerns me more than whether an athlete misses a few workouts during a busy week.

We’ve watched athletes come in during an offseason and absolutely crush it. They train consistently for eight or ten weeks. They get noticeably stronger. Their movement improves. They start running faster. They become more confident in the weight room, and you can see them beginning to understand what their body is capable of doing.

Then the season starts.

Training disappears completely.

We might not see that athlete again for four or five months. When they finally come back, part of the next training block is spent rebuilding qualities we already spent time developing.

Then they make progress again.

Then another season starts.

Then they stop again.

Do that once and it’s not a big deal. We’re talking about kids here. Vacations happen. Schedules change. There are busy weeks when something has to give, and sports should absolutely take priority at different points throughout the year.

Do it every year from 12 to 17, though, and it becomes something different.

Imagine two 13-year-old baseball players who are pretty similar right now. They both take lessons, practice with their teams and play plenty of baseball.

One of them spends the next four years consistently training. His training changes throughout the year. Sometimes he’s training hard three days per week. During a busy season it might be twice. There may be weeks where he needs more recovery and we pull back. But we continue stacking development.

The other athlete trains whenever there happens to be an “offseason.” He gets eight weeks here, maybe six weeks there, and stops every time baseball gets busy.

At 17, both kids might have played a tremendous amount of baseball. They may have taken thousands upon thousands of swings.

But they haven’t spent four years building the same athlete.

Over a few weeks, that difference might be difficult to see. Over four or five years, it can become enormous.

Development Compounds

There’s research behind this too.

A systematic review and meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine examined 43 studies involving young athletes between the ages of 6 and 18. Researchers found that resistance training improved muscular strength and vertical jump performance and also produced improvements in sprinting, agility and sport-specific performance.

One of the findings I find especially interesting is that longer training periods were associated with greater strength improvements.

That makes sense to anyone who has coached for a long time. We don’t expect a freshman to walk into the weight room in September and become a fully developed athlete by November. The body adapts over time.

Strength gets built upon strength. Better movement gives us more options later. An athlete who learns how to sprint well can eventually apply more force to those positions. As athletes grow and mature physically, the foundation they’ve been building gives us more to work with.

That’s why I think we sometimes ask the wrong question about youth training.

We ask, “How much better can we get them before baseball starts?”

I’m much more interested in asking, “Who could this kid become if we consistently developed them for the next five years?”

Those are two very different questions.

The Part You Can Control

We’ve had the opportunity to watch this play out in a pretty remarkable way with Chase DeLauter.

Most people around Frederick know Chase’s story now. They know about the first-round draft pick and the Cleveland Guardians. They know the version of the story where a local kid became one of the best baseball prospects in the country.

What I think is more valuable for young athletes is everything that happened before that.

Coming out of high school, Chase wasn’t the kid with a long list of Division I offers. He wasn’t spending every weekend traveling around the country trying to get in front of more scouts. He didn’t have the recruiting attention that a lot of young athletes have been led to believe they need in order to eventually play at a high level.

He was overlooked.

I remember having conversations during those years about focusing on what we could actually control. We couldn’t control who was watching. We couldn’t control which schools called. We couldn’t control rankings, attention or what another athlete was doing.

We could control the work.

So that’s where the focus stayed.

Chase kept playing baseball, obviously, but he also kept preparing. He got stronger. He became more powerful. He worked on his speed. He continued developing his body while continuing to develop as a baseball player.

Eventually, James Madison gave him an opportunity.

And when that opportunity came, he was prepared to do something with it.

What happened from there is pretty incredible. Chase developed into one of the best players in college baseball and ultimately became a first-round MLB Draft pick by the Cleveland Guardians.

It’s easy to look at where someone ends up and assume the path was always obvious. It rarely is.

There was a time when Chase was just another high school kid from Frederick trying to figure out where he was going to play college baseball.

That’s the part of his story I wish more young athletes paid attention to.

There is an incredible amount of energy being spent in youth sports right now trying to get noticed. More showcases. More tournaments. More exposure. More opportunities to get in front of the right person.

I’m not saying those things never have value. They absolutely can.

But attention isn’t development.

And being overlooked doesn’t mean you stop developing.

If anything, that’s when preparation matters most.

You keep working. You keep building. You keep controlling the things you can control so that if someone eventually does give you an opportunity, you’re prepared to do something with it.

Chase’s story obviously has an extraordinary ending, and most athletes aren’t going to become first-round draft picks. That’s not the lesson.

The lesson is much simpler.

You can’t always control when the opportunity comes. You can control how prepared you are when it does.

Think About What the Sport Is Asking the Body to Handle

There’s another reason preparation matters that has nothing to do with adding five pounds to a squat or shaving a tenth off a sprint.

Sports place a tremendous amount of stress on the body, especially as kids get older.

Think about a volleyball player jumping and landing hundreds of times throughout practices and tournaments. Think about a soccer player sprinting, cutting and decelerating over and over again. Think about a baseball pitcher repeatedly asking the shoulder and elbow to tolerate extremely high forces.

Now look at what youth sports calendars have become.

A kid might play for a school team and a club team. There are private lessons mixed in. Weekend tournaments can mean several games in two days. One season ends on Sunday and the next one seems to begin Monday.

At some point, we have to ask whether we’re only adding more demand or whether we’re also preparing the body to handle it.

The American Academy of Pediatrics addressed this in its 2024 clinical report on overuse injuries, overtraining and burnout in young athletes. The report explains that repetitive stress without enough recovery can contribute to accumulated musculoskeletal damage and overuse injuries. The National Strength and Conditioning Association has raised a similar concern, particularly when young athletes accumulate large amounts of competition without adequate preparatory conditioning.

That doesn’t mean strength training makes a kid injury-proof. It doesn’t. If anyone promises you that their program prevents injuries, I’d be skeptical.

What we can do is improve the relationship between what we’re asking an athlete to do and what they’re physically prepared to handle.

I’ve always thought about that as demand versus capacity.

Every sprint, throw, cut, jump, practice and game creates demand. Our job in training is to build as much useful capacity as we reasonably can while still respecting recovery.

If an athlete is already struggling to tolerate the amount of throwing they’re doing, simply throwing more probably isn’t the entire answer.

We would never tell someone to prepare for a marathon by racing marathons every weekend. We’d expect them to train between races, gradually build their body, manage their mileage and recover.

Sometimes youth sports forget that same logic.

More Isn’t Always Better

This is probably the part of youth sports I struggle with the most.

There is always something else you can sign up for.

Another tournament. Another showcase. Another camp. Another team. Another lesson. Another opportunity promising to get an athlete in front of the right person.

Parents are trying to do right by their kids. I believe that. If your child has a dream and you’re fortunate enough to give them opportunities to chase it, of course you want to help.

The problem comes when we start believing that saying no to an opportunity means they’re falling behind.

There is some important research here too.

A systematic review and meta-analysis involving 1,429 adolescent athletes found that athletes specializing in a single sport reported higher levels across all three measured dimensions of burnout: exhaustion, a reduced sense of accomplishment and sport devaluation.

That doesn’t mean every athlete who specializes is going to burn out. It also doesn’t mean serious athletes shouldn’t spend significant time developing their sport. Every athlete is different, and we have to be careful about taking population-level research and treating it like a prediction for one individual kid.

But I do think it should make us stop and think about what we’re asking of them.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that young athletes have regular time away from sport-specific training and competition, including at least one to two days each week for recovery and periods away from an individual sport during the year.

Sometimes the thing a baseball player needs most isn’t another baseball activity.

Maybe he needs to get stronger. Maybe he needs to sprint. Maybe he needs to play basketball with his friends. Maybe he needs to sleep.

Maybe he needs a Saturday where he’s just a 14-year-old kid.

That’s not being less committed. That’s taking a longer view of development.

What About Training During the Season?

Whenever I talk about this, I want to be clear about something.

I’m not arguing that athletes should keep piling more onto an already overloaded schedule.

That’s not good coaching either.

If one of our athletes plays five games over the weekend, I’m not interested in crushing them Monday afternoon because our spreadsheet says it’s a heavy lower-body day.

We coach the person standing in front of us.

If competition goes up, training may need to come down. We may change exercises, reduce volume, adjust intensity or train fewer days. There are times when an athlete walks in and the best decision we can make is to pull something back. There are even times when recovery is the training.

That’s very different from abandoning physical preparation for three, four or six months.

The offseason gives us more freedom to build. During the season, the job changes. We’re trying to maintain important physical qualities, continue developing where it makes sense and make sure training complements what the athlete is doing instead of competing with it.

The calendar changes.

The goal doesn’t.

We’re still building the athlete.

Where Are We Actually Trying to Get?

After doing this for a long time, I’ve become much more interested in this question.

Not, “How do we get Johnny ready for Saturday?”

Where are we trying to get Johnny when he’s 17?

If he’s 13 right now, we have years.

That’s an incredible opportunity.

We have years to teach him how to move well. Years to progressively get stronger. Years to learn how to sprint, jump, land and produce force. Years to teach him how to train, how to recover and eventually how to take ownership of his own preparation.

The NSCA’s model of long-term athletic development takes a similar approach. Children and adolescents aren’t simply smaller versions of adult athletes. Their physical, psychological and social needs change as they grow, which is why development should be structured, progressive and appropriate for the athlete standing in front of us.

When we zoom out that far, missing one workout because of a tournament doesn’t scare me.

What concerns me is missing years because we decided playing the sport was the same thing as preparing for it.

Those years add up.

Play the Sport. And Prepare for It.

I don’t want anyone reading this to walk away thinking we’re against playing sports.

We’re a gym full of people who love sports.

Some of the greatest lessons kids learn will happen on fields and courts, not inside our walls. They’ll learn how to compete. They’ll fail. They’ll win. They’ll sit on the bench when they think they deserve to play. They’ll have great coaches and probably some coaches they don’t like very much. They’ll make friendships they’ll remember long after their playing careers are over.

They should play.

We just need to understand that playing and preparing have different jobs.

Practice develops skills. Competition gives athletes opportunities to test those skills. Physical preparation continues building the athlete underneath them. When those pieces work together over years, that’s development.

So as another school year starts and calendars begin filling up, I’d encourage parents to zoom out for a minute. Don’t just look at how much your athlete has scheduled this fall. Ask what all of that activity is actually developing.

Ask what you’re building.

Because eventually, some of the moments these kids are working toward may actually arrive.

The varsity spot might open up. There may be a championship game. A college coach might actually be sitting in the stands. They might get an opportunity they have spent years dreaming about.

Or maybe, like Chase, the attention doesn’t come when they thought it would.

Keep preparing anyway.

None of us can guarantee when the opportunity will come. We certainly can’t guarantee where sports will ultimately take any young athlete.

Our job is to help them control what they can control and prepare as though the opportunity might come.

Then, if the door does open, they don’t have to wish they had started getting ready sooner.

That’s the long game.

Being seen isn’t the goal. Being ready is.

Sources & Further Reading

National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA).Long-Term Athletic Development Position Statement. Guidance on long-term youth athletic development, muscular strength, motor skills, physical literacy and appropriate training throughout childhood and adolescence.

Lesinski M, Prieske O, Granacher U.Effects and dose-response relationships of resistance training on physical performance in youth athletes: a systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2016;50:781–795.

American Academy of Pediatrics.Overuse Injuries, Overtraining, and Burnout in Young Athletes. Pediatrics. 2024. Clinical guidance addressing training load, recovery, overuse injuries, year-round sport participation and burnout.

Giusti NE, Carder SL, Vopat L, et al.Comparing Burnout in Sport-Specializing Versus Sport-Sampling Adolescent Athletes: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine. 2020.