Florida expert says there’s 1 secret to making your kid succeed at sports. No, it’s not travel teams: ‘I’ve had a few pro athletes tell me this!’

Parents of youth athletes do not play games. They push themselves and their kiddos to do more—more games, more practices, more weekends spent in a minivan.

But one performance coach says the real secret to success is less about scheduling and more about the weight room.

‘Not just putting your kid on three travel teams because everyone else does it’

Performance coach Cole Stassi (@cs1.performance) shares a PSA aimed at sports parents. His video has more than 248,000 views.

“If you’re a parent and you truly want your kid to succeed in sport … And I mean truly, not just putting your kid on three travel teams because everyone else does it … You need to put them into a strength and conditioning program with a trainer,” Stassi says. “So that they’re able to get bigger, faster, and stronger.”

Stassi’s reasoning is purely about playing the odds. He says there’s one key set of factors that determines what kind of kids come out on top.

“The best kids, especially in youth sports, are always the ones that are bigger, faster, and stronger than everyone else,” he says. “Skills develop over time. Attributes like speed, power, that stuff you need to develop when you’re younger so that you can express it when you’re older.”

Viewers in Stassi’s comment section seemed to agree with this idea. One person even said they’d heard as much from pros.

“I’ve had a few pro athletes tell me this!” they wrote. “Got my son in a strength and conditioning program all summer!”

Does research support strength training?

Expert consensus has largely moved away from the old worry that lifting is dangerous for kids. Healio reported in 2020 that the American Academy of Pediatrics “issued a revised policy statement regarding resistance training, saying children of all ages can benefit from it under the proper supervision.” It cited gains in strength, power, bone density, and resistance to injury, and said children as young as 5 to 7 could start some form of such training.

However, while Stassi’s claim that the best youth athletes are the biggest and fastest is somewhat well-founded, researchers warn this perception can be misleading. A 2017 study of 472 boys at two soccer academies found that early-maturing boys were overrepresented, and that the effect grew with age.

Stack Sports reported on this phenomenon, investigating whether young athletes who are “bigger, stronger and faster than ever before” are actually better at sports in the long run. Ottawa Senators head strength and conditioning coach Chris Schwarz didn’t seem convinced.

​​“We started saying, ‘Look at all these performance parameters—they’re getting better. They’re stronger, they’re more powerful, they’re blowing the tests away. But I’m not sure we’re spitting out better athletes,’” Schwarz told Stack Sports. “(I started asking them) to do things in other sports just to see if they could do it. Can they throw with their left hand? … Can they kick with both feet? … All things that when I was an athlete, (we’d) think, ‘Yea I could that.’ And they just can’t do it.”

This story is republished with permission. It originally appeared on Subplot News.

WRITTEN BY

Sophia Paslidis

Sophia Paslidis is a contributing reporter to Subplot, The Mary Sue, and Buzz News. You can email her at [email protected].

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