Confession: I used to be part of the problem.
It’s an odd reflection as a youth performance coach.
Eh, gut wrenching, actually.
You see, I started my career in 2012 as a skills coach to kids, and while I thought I was reinventing the wheel, taking them through innovative drills, and offering a unique, groundbreaking service, I wasn’t.
After a year immersed in the skills training world, I realized I was causing more harm than good.
I realized I was a drone of clones that were skills trainers.
I realized I was the overuse injury problem.
I realized I was contributing to the burnout epidemic.
I realized I was a part of the ACL spikes for female soccer players’ problem.
Worse yet, I realized I wasn’t teaching anything revolutionary, anything fresh that a kid can’t learn from either her sport coach, or in her own front yard with the ball at her feet.
Of course, tons of money was made from tossing out cones, telling kids to toe-tap on the ball, teaching Scissors moves and shouting a running commentary of “quick feet!” or “fast touches!” and so much more nauseam.
After a while, I felt so incredibly out of my integrity and became jaded.
In fact, today, I’m embarrassed at the coach I was and am grateful I dug myself out of the skills training black hole that is keeping kids from experiencing the richness of childhood – the one that builds them into total humans who are balanced, coordinated, body aware, creative, but also, resilient, robust and downright strong.
“I am grateful I dug myself out of the skills training black hole that is keeping kids from experiencing the richness of childhood”
But don’t get it twisted: none of this is to say I resent skills trainers today. Rather, it’s a wake-up call to them to look at what kids need, and tweak their sessions to provide kids with more physical development that is the foundation for enhancing technical skills.
It wasn’t until I saw overuse injuries like IT band syndrome, patellar pain, and stress fractures in 12-year-old kids, when I decided to make my exit and focus more on the holistic lens of speed, strength and conditioning.
I mean come on: no 12-year-old should experience a nagging soft tissue injury. That’s for 80-year-olds.
Too, an ACL surgeons shouldn’t be operating on a roster of middle school girls.
It’s a problem, to say the least.
And this it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.
Why Skills Shouldn’t Dominate Performance
As I mentioned above, I don’t loathe skills trainers.
Kids can become technically sound and hone in on their ball work, pitch work, and batting work, and swinging and shooting work.
However, the skill work cannot be at the expense of ignoring stability, mobility, balance, coordination, speed, strength and power. It should never overshadow giving kids what they really need to continue to blossom into blistering fast and robust athletes as they climb the peak to college sports and beyond.
And vice versa: performance training and becoming strong as hell shouldn’t overshadow skill acquisition. I used to be one of those strength coaches that preached “gym, gym, gym, strength, strength, strength.”
Now I know better.
True youth athlete development is a continuous balancing act of filling all of the buckets to performance, leaning into the art of coaching, and analyzing where a kid needs help, whether it’s their skill work, movement competency, speed, strength or power development.
Even now, skills trainers have the unique opportunity to shine and sprinkle in pieces of long-term physical development into their sessions, whether it’s doing a dynamic warm-up with core stability work, adding in primal movements like Bear Crawls, Crab Walks, and Cross Crawls, or reinforcing the fundamental movement patterns for better body awareness, stability and mobility.
Why Movement Competency is Important
To coaches and skills trainers, it seems peculiar to focus on movement skills like balancing, falling, romping, fighting, jumping, landing, throwing, hitting, kicking, shooting, climbing, and swinging.
Furthermore, it seems strange for a sport like soccer, for kids to work on throwing and catching and dodging.
It seems strange for a sport like baseball, for kids to work on climbing.
It seems strange for a sport like track, for kids to venture outside of the linear realm.
It seems strange for a sport like lacrosse, for kids to work on roughhousing and romping.
Why can’t a baseball player just throw thousands of pitches year-round?
Why can’t a soccer player rocket thousands of shots year-round?
Why can’t a track runner stay linear year-round?
For one, we have to remember we have growing, maturing kids in our hands both physically, mentally and socially, and who are experiencing the most optimal years of neural growth.
I always ask when planning a session, “Is what I’m programming good for this child’s brain?”
For a child’s motor development, it is critical to create an environment and opportunity for exploration, in order to improve the perceptual-motor system (Lubans, Morgan, Cliff, Barnett, et al., 2010). Allowing children to discover through trial and error boosts creativity, develops all muscle groups, encourages them to learn from failures, and adapt to new stimuli and problem solve in new environments.
Looking to the sport of soccer, games like Hand Ball, Dodgeball, and Catching and Throwing Monkey in the Middle seem counterproductive for a game played the feet, but the carryover is tremendous from a tactical standpoint.
There’s rapid movement off the ball. There’s field scanning with the eyes up. There’s awareness. There’s creative expression with minimal coaching cues. There’s agility. There’s teamwork and strategy. There’s variety.
The plasticity of the young neuromuscular system is immense, especially during ages 6-12, also known as the “window of opportunity” years. This is the time when fun games that include agility and reactivity must be programmed so kids optimize motor development with an accelerated learning effect (Balyi & Hamilton, 2004).
So this begs the question, “can skills trainer work in these games in the first 5-10 min of training”? Can they give kids the creativity and variety they need to develop the entirety of the cells, organs and tissues in their system? Can they take advantage of this ‘window of opportunity’ so their athletes blossom in the later high school and college years?
After all, most young athletes today aspire to play in college. It’s worth mentioning they don’t aspire to peak at age 13, yet we drive them into early specialization with no variety of movement and resistance training to support their continuous development. This is where development can become stagnant, or they reach a wall altogether.
The long-term pursuit is not only good for ensuring they continue to progress into the fullest expression of themselves as they age, but a healthy and powerful one.
Don’t Forget About Overuse Injury and the ACL Epidemic
A 10-year-old shouldn’t have soft tissue injury.
Nor should a 12-year-old go under the knife.
End of story.
However, what we are seeing now is a decline in physical education, neighborhood play, and resistance training that builds kids into resilient humans.
Are we surprised we’re seeing these injuries?
It’s funny, because there are youth clubs that tout athlete development as their slogan, yet no priority is made for a comprehensive injury reduction program.
The juxtaposition of athlete development combined with more skills training is a confusing one.
Isn’t athlete development physical, too?
Here’s why the “we don’t have time for resistance training” is a dangerous argument:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU-YRROiMDc&t=73s
With resistance training, we provide kids with a stimulus harder than skill work for their muscles, bones, and tendons to adapt, build and grow.
For female athletes, patellar pain in the knee runs rampant due to lower and upper extremity weakness. According to the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, lower extremity overuse injuries in female youth soccer players affected primarily the knee. Lower knee separation distance, decreased lower extremity strength, and playing on more than 1 soccer team increased injury risk.
These findings offer opportunities to prevent overuse injuries in this population by developing training programs that address strength and biomechanics, exercising caution with regard to participation on multiple teams in the same sport, and encouraging a wider range of physical activity.
Adding on to challenging stimulus with load and muscle action, a variety must come into play, so the child to physically develops without compensations and overtrained muscles from the nauseam of repetitive skill work.
Here is a video explaining over repetition without variety can be a problem for youth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kq4ljdKl8A&feature=youtu.be
Coming back to the soccer example, yes, soccer players need catching, throwing, wrestling, and tackling drills as they’re in their prime years of growth.
They need it not only for hand-eye coordination and ability to scan the field and be aware of their bodies in space, but they need it for proper muscle development and to evade any weaknesses and imbalances.
If the shoulders are weak, the hip flexors are tight, and the glutes are inhibited. If the glutes are inhibited, the knees and ankles are unstable.
We can look at this up the chain as well.
Starting at the feet, it’s important to strengthen the base as much as possible, otherwise the rest of the chain can be disrupted and unable to produce the force it needs for speed, or the movement quality for pelvic function and rotator cuff health.
In baseball athletes, if the feet, ankles, calves and hips are weak, the posture is compromised, the trunk is weak, and the shoulders and back aren’t strong enough to withstand the thousands of pitches and throws in the Little League.
In track athletes, if they don’t venture into the lateral and rotational planes, will their muscles supporting the stability of the knee develop to their potential? Will we load the bones enough to reduce the chance of stress fractures?
Why do our kids a disservice by building just their upper, or just their lower in isolation?
Why not develop the complete human who can withstand the current climate of more games, more tournaments, more showcases, more meets, and more, more, more?
Why not be a facilitator who promotes total body strengthening that they can eventually do on their own?
A Developed Human is a Fast and Agile One, Too
For the past 9 years of coaching, the young athletes who come into my facility and who sampled a plethora of sports, whether recreational or pick-up, are the most balanced, coordinated, fastest and most agile.
It makes sense when I hear them discussing the exposure of their nervous systems to running fast, to reacting rapidly and to exerting the entirety of their system in the form of Capture the Flag, Hide n’ Seek, and Dodgeball in those 6-12 years of opportunity. Not once did they time their miles. Not once did they only do skill work.
They simply were kids.
Too, after 9 years of coaching under a long-term development model and encouraging sampling, zero ACL injuries have occurred. Excuse me, while I knock on wood, and continue to go against the grain, as parents watch me during a “skills” session incorporate Hand Ball, jumping and landing mechanics, and Pull-Up Hangs on the goal post.
The hardest part has been to explain to parents what kids truly need in the early years of neuromuscular development, and to be a living, walking example of it in my sessions, despite them breathing down my neck.
Expounding further, as athletes progress into high school, we have to communicate with parents and include in our sessions a greater stimulus than the game for better muscular adaptation and growth.
An athlete with a strong engine that permeates the feet up to the ankles up to the hips up to the trunk and up to the shoulders, is an unstoppable one. Why would we want the system to have any leaks? Why would we not strengthen the whole?
The Greater Purpose
As skills coaches and coaches, we have the power to teach kids healthy habits for a lifetime.
There will be that last game they play, whether it’s in high school, college and beyond.
Realistically, sport is finite, but the strength of a human is not.
When we teach kids young to love movement, to realize what they are capable of, and allow them to overcome feats of strength, solve problems, and overcome challenges, we engraining them valuable habits as they enter the real, working world.
Can they handle a board room meeting with their confidence?
Can they start a brand or create a new phone app with their creativity?
Can they boost immunity and avoid disease with their daily, healthy habits?
And the list goes on.
By serving our kids beyond just skill work, namely, developing the human as an entire system to adapt and thrive, is preparing them for the stress and fullness of life.
Skills trainers can finally introduce something revolutionary by including these pieces into what they currently do. We can’t isolate the young athlete to just being a master on the ball. It’s tantamount to isolating a doctor to just textbook jargon, and no bedside communication.
We must encourage the multi-dimensional being to be just that. Not only is it preparing them for the dynamic nature of their sport, but it is preparing them to find in themselves their own power to heal, become strong, and level up in the phase of adversity for a lifetime.
Put simply, nothing phases them because we trained them to be resilient and malleable.
I truly believe sports don’t teach kids how to handle adversity.
No.
Coaches do.
Are you implementing in your program the tools necessary for our youth to thrive in years to come?
Are you creating mundane robots, or are you building adaptable humans?
About Erica Suter
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References
Balyi, I. & Hamilton, A. (2004). Long-Term Athletic Development: Trainability in childhood and adolescence. Windows of opportunity. Optimal trainability. Victoria: National Coaching Institute British Columbia & Advanced Training and Performance Ltd.
Lubans, D.R., Morgan, P.J., Cliff, D.P., Barentt, L.M., et al. (2010). ‘Fundamental Movement Skills in children and adolescents.’ Sports Medicine, 40(12): 1019-1035.
O’Kane, J. W., Neradilek, M., Polissar, N., Sabado, L., Tencer, A., & Schiff, M. A. (2017). Risk Factors for Lower Extremity Overuse Injuries in Female Youth Soccer Players. Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2325967117733963
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