It’s where you can make the biggest difference.
“The reason I love working with youth athletes is because it’s where you can make the biggest difference.
Not only from a sport performance perspective, but life performance.
You get to mentor, lead, teach, coach, love on, and increase the confidence of our most precious assets.”
-Ray Zingler on X
The reason I am so passionate about training youth athletes is because I truly feel it is where you can make the biggest difference.
And I don’t mean this strictly from a sports performance perspective.
If we’re being honest, just about any coach worth their salt can help a prepubescent child growing through puberty get bigger, stronger, and faster.
It has a lot more to do with hormones than it does a perfectly scripted strength program, despite the program still being important. (Look at how easy it is to improve performance, yet unqualified adults everywhere, everyday still find a way to massively screw it up!)
Beyond the training side, which again is pretty straight forward, think about what you can do for youth athletes mentally.
You can increase the most critical sport and life performance metric out there.
Confidence.
You can take a shy, nervy kid who doesn’t know what they are doing, teach them how to ‘do it’, and then watch them blossom.
In 15 years of business, I’ve watched this process take place thousands of times, literally thousands, and not for one second of one day has it gotten “old”.
It’s quite literally the most fulfilling thing in the world.
How do you do it?
Do you just tell them to do push-ups and say good job?
This is what most try to do, yet they can’t teach them to correctly do push-ups nor do they understand how affirmation works.
It’s a bit more complex than that (if it weren’t everybody would be doing it and we’d have confident kids everywhere).
First you must show kids that you care. That you give a shit about them and their well-being.
From there, you must build trust with them. Rock solid trust. This is so that kids feel comfortable enough to express their authentic selves with you.
Next you have to lead them by example. Show them the way, and then show them how to do it.
Finally, it’s holding them accountable, following up, and following through.
I don’t care the age or ability level of any kid.
You follow this process relentlessly and you will improve a kids quality of life 100 times out of 100.
I promise.
