Here’s a take I don’t think we say out loud enough:
Players are capable of way more than what we currently ask of them.
Players are capable of way more than what we currently ask of them.
Not just physically but mentally, tactically, competitively, emotionally. But somewhere along the way, coaching swung away from developing athletes and toward not upsetting them. The bar slid quietly lower, inch by inch, wrapped in “protecting kids,” “managing burnout,” and a cultural obsession with micro-recovery.
And listen, none of those things are bad in isolation. The problem is how they’ve combined into the slow erosion of standards.
Players Aren’t Fragile, Our Standards Are
When coaches say “I don’t want to push them too hard,” or “I can’t make them want it”. What they often mean is, “I’m scared they’ll quit,” or “I’m scared parents will complain,” or “I don’t have the education to load this properly, so I’ll just go light.”
But here’s the irony:
Players don’t leave because it’s hard. Players leave because it’s pointless.
Players don’t leave because it’s hard. Players leave because it’s pointless.
Ask any motivated kid, and the most fun they’ve ever had was either competing or improving. Both require effort. Both require pressure. Both require standards.
Kids don’t quit because they’re tired. They quit because they’re bored.
The Recovery Bubble
Recovery has turned into an identity.
For most teenagers or pre-teens, 6 hours of organized sport a week plus a full night of sleep isn’t a heavy load, it’s a normal, healthy activity.
But because the language of “load management” has trickled down from the pro ranks, a lot of kids now label perfectly reasonable effort as “hard” or “exhausting.”
The problem isn’t the workload, it’s the frame. When you grow up thinking that moderate training is “a lot,” you never develop the physical or mental baseline to handle true development work later.
The human body at that age is incredibly adaptable, it can sprint, skate, jump, compete, and recover fast. Historically, kids didn’t burnout from 6 hours of sport; they burned out from doing nothing exciting, challenging, or engaging.
Most athletes don’t need less work at that age, they need more consistency, more play, more intensity, and more expectation, so the ceiling moves upward instead of downward.
Research is clear: for developing athletes, the biggest recovery tools are boring and practically free:
- Enough sleep
- Enough food
- Enough hydration
- Consistent training
Coaches worry a lot about overtraining, but for most youth athletes, under-training is actually the bigger threat to development. Overtraining requires sustained high volume, high intensity, and poor recovery over long windows. That’s not what’s happening in most youth environments. What we see instead is low volume, low intensity, and inconsistent workloads, three practices this week, one next week, a tournament, then a week off. The body never adapts to anything because there’s nothing to adapt to.
Development comes from progressive overload: stress → recovery → adaptation. If the stress is too low or too infrequent, there is no adaptation. Athletes stay the same.
Under-training also creates the exact problem we fear: when intensity suddenly spikes (showcases, tryouts, playoffs), athletes get hurt more easily because their “chronic load” is low. Research calls this the training–injury paradox: players are safer and perform better when they’re consistently trained, not protected from training.
Sport science keeps coming back to the same conclusion:
Athletes don’t get injured from hard work! They get injured from sporadic, unplanned, inconsistent work.
Athletes don’t get injured from hard work! They get injured from sporadic, unplanned, inconsistent work.
Raising Standards Isn’t Abuse, It’s Coaching
We’ve gotten scared to ask for more.
Not more chaos or more punishment.
More intent. More pace. More compete. More detail. More purpose.
Not more chaos or more punishment.
More intent. More pace. More compete. More detail. More purpose.
The mission isn’t to run kids into the ground but to train them up to the level they say they want to play at.
If a player tells you they want to:
- make AAA
- play junior
- make a prep team
- make U Sport/NCAA
Then the standard has to reflect that path. Otherwise, we’re lying to them.
You can’t say “You’re capable of great things” and then run practices that never ask them to prove it.
The Dirty Secret of Player Capability
Watch any youth hockey game over U13:
- Players have more in the tank than they show in practice.
They compete harder in games because games force standards.- Competition is a multiplier. Stress is a teacher. Intensity is a mirror.
It shows players who they are and where the gaps are. - We need more of that in training, not less.
- Coaches Need to Stop Coaching Scared
This isn’t a call to go old-school and ignore recovery, sports psych, or athlete health. It’s the opposite:
Use those tools to support higher standards, not replace them.
The best coaching environments aren’t soft or brutal, they’re demanding and supportive at the same time.
Athletes don’t rise to what’s comfortable.
They rise to what’s expected.
They rise to what’s expected.
If we truly believe in development, then we have to raise the standard.
If we believe players are capable of more, then we have to ask for more.
Because right now?
The players aren’t underperforming; we are under-demanding.
The players aren’t underperforming; we are under-demanding.
