If you care about your kid’s athletic potential, it’s important to educate yourself on the difference.
“The sport specific bros aren’t ‘performance coaches’.
They don’t understand anything about physiology, long term athletic development, or designing progressive youth training models.
They feed kids random sport practice drills, bullshit footwork dances, & ‘core’.
It’s hot garbage.”
-Ray Zingler on X
You can’t live in absolutes.
I get it.
There are some great sport specific coaches out there.
Back in the day, we called them sport coaches.
And they were good enough to tangibly give kids value during the time that was spent, well, you know, practicing the technical, tactical, and situational aspects of their sport.
Which is essentially the same thing they are doing at “sport specific” training, usually with less quality.
There are a variety of reasons the quality is lower, before you factor in the “nice guy” prescribing the “training” doesn’t know his asshole from his elbow when it comes to youth athletic development.
Think about it. Do the math.
Most of our kids are already doing “too much specific sport”. They are playing higher volumes of specific sport today, more than any other time in human history. And you think they need MORE sport specifics ON TOP of the already egregious abundance? And your kid can’t even skip or back pedal well? What the fuck are we doing?
Their sport specific buckets are not only full, they are overflowing.
Does your kids sport specific guru talk to them about overuse? Psychological readiness? I didn’t think so. He doesn’t even know what that means.
He’s too busy “creating” some dumb ass icky shuffle footwork x nuanced sport specific move drill that would never actually happen in a real game so that he can look the “advanced” part, so that you can justify buying the “training”.
Sports are dynamic, chaotic, and reactive in nature. Closed, preplanned, & choreographed drills don’t transfer to real world sporting environments, despite how cool they look on Instagram.
We are taking kids who are already doing too much and then prescribing them higher quantities, of lower quality specific work, all while they have a gaping hole of neglect in an enormous component of their overall development.
And grown ass adults, PAY former, washed up, D2 athletes who “liked sports, so I may as well train kids, until I realize the money isn’t sustainable and quit” to further widen their kids athletic development gap.
We need reform and we need it bad.
Because with each passing day, these snakeoil salesman are distancing kids further and further from their potential.
