Seeking advice on raising high level athletic children

I would start by not insisting on D -1 as a maxim. Otherwise you'll always be disappointed.

Mike Garritson did this and so did the Abrahamson dad and they messed up their kids.

Start smaller.

As someone experienced in Child development, i can tell you to do more reading about applicable development stages with young athletes.

I'm not insisting on D1. I'm seeking the advice from people that have been there and done that. I'm more interested in the process/approach those people think their parents took.

Coming from a coach who has seen (and raised) D1 athletes.

My son was a solid, not great talent in middle school. Maybe win a race or two, but never anything special. However, I always told him that as long as he did as much as he could in PREPARATION for an event (nutrition, sleep, training), then I didn’t care how he performed. It was more important to me that he was laying the foundation for a strong work ethic when he was young than if he was blowing the roof off races. I never demeaned him after a race, I only really focused on his effort. He was still a kid and it was more critical to make sure he loved the sport and was willing to have the base to keep working.

Come high school, I applied a little bit more input after races in terms that were never cruel. If He truly felt he didn’t put in his best effort, I didn’t allow him to be upset about the race. However, I always reminded him I cared about him no matter what happened. He had the foundational practices down from earlier times, and so he had a great baseline in high school. From there, it was up to him. I stepped back and let him take the reigns.

The goal shouldn’t be what division you play/run/whatever. If you can get your kid to have the foundation and live and LOVE the sport, he will put in the work on his own and see how far it can take him. It’s much more rewarding to see my son work his tail off without a word from me-he wants it that bad that he is INTRISTICALLY motivated. The kid has to be the one to have the fire.

Since you ask: leave out the athletic part in the goal statement. Include it.

Here is my thought: pre-puberty: focus on fun, coordination, good practice and playing a wide variety of sports. post-puberty: try to excel at the sport that best aligns with your body type and interests.

Not a parent but I've noticed among the parents of champion athletes, particularly the Williams sisters and Mikaela Shiffrin that at young ages they purposely held their kids out of competitions in favor of more practice time. I've also noticed this emphasis on training over competing in European soccer academies, as well as baseball in the Dominican Republic. Mikaela Shiffrin's parents specifically said that youth ski races were stupid because they would have to drive for hours for Mikaela to do two runs and come back with a blue ribbon when they could have been on the snow for hours at their home mountain.

Especially at a young age all the wasted time and money that goes into the youth sports industrial complex to show what kid/kid's team is the best at *insert arbitrary tournament* in *insert arbitrary age group* could be much better spent practicing. Also the desire to win can cause young athletes to take shortcuts that can be beneficial for winning today but not long term development. I know as a youth baseball player I wasted a lot of at bats trying to draw a walk or bunt for a base hit when I should have been focusing on actually hitting.

Also I wonder how much value intense youth sports have before puberty. Like what sport an athlete is best suited for is likely not to reveal itself until after their growth sport. Also the elite natural athletes are going to be able to excel at frankly whatever sport they focus on, if you push your kid to being a great basketball player, then he tops out at 5' 10", college coaches are going to be way more interested in the 6' 8" kid who just took up the sport a couple years ago.

This is why I hope my kid wants to be a runner. You don't need to spend $$$$$ and sacrifice family vacations to the youth sports industrial complex particularly not before the kid is in high school.

Good on you. That's how it should be done.

I have 4 D1 athletes. What do you want to know? My kids played multiple sports until JH. They are top of their class academically also. My wife stayed home until our youngest was in 2nd grade which I believe has a lot to do with their academic development.

I am now raising my own 2 girls, about the same age as yours. I did run D1 track/xc, brother played d2 football and sister also ran D1 track/xc. We didn't do organized sports until around 10ish and did Church league/YMCA sports (soccer, swim team, baseball, basketball, couple of track meets). My parents didn't push us to do organized sports and just encouraged us to do something through the school starting in high school. My parents supported us by showing up to meets/games and my dad in particular told me times he thought I could achieve/my mom drove me to off season practice to run on trails/go hiking etc. My mom did do volleyball and dad was a rower in college but neither continued to be athletic while they were raising us. The only thing I wish they had done differently that I am trying to do as a parent is emulate a life-long dedication to being healthy/exercise as a part of life, not just something you do in school/to compete.

A lot of parent obsess over their kids futures and put them in intense training programs starting at age 4 thinking it means they will be d1 athletes. They might end up there but more likely they'll be burnt out and hate the sport by the time they're in college, especially if you try to single sport specialize. Honestly your best bet is to just have them do a variety of sports. Don't be the person trying to live vicariously through their kids. It doesn't end well.

Two kids in mid distance at power 5 school.

Keep kids in multiple sports as long as possible. Do not have kids specialize in track until they have hit high school. Preferably have them play multiple sports as underclassmen. Even if they are not great at the sport, they will interact with different types of teammates and coaches. My daughter was about a 20% field goal shooter but she loved playing basketball as long as she could.

You don’t want a kid to plateau in track as a freshman or sophomore because they are sick of it or were over trained early.

The good thing about track is that it is not subjective. So a kid can join soph or junior year. My son played hoops and baseball through sophomore year. Then he figured out that track would be his only way to compete at the schools to which he applied. The kids that did jr Olympics and age group stuff in jr high got burned out.

We never insisted kids play sports but we told them that they had to do something between 330pm and 6pm. Join the band, chess club or drama. Basically any club except for Canadian Club. We wanted them to be able to go to school with ability to join a social group / team etc. so they weren’t ‘floating’ as freshmen in college.

Your kids are 6 and 8. Nothing means anything before puberty matters no matter how good they are or aren't now. You mention hoping maybe they'll get a scholarship. Don't. Think about how you'll pay for college. If a scholarship comes along later it's a bonus. Don't get in the way of their enjoyment of a sport. Don't push them into one for your own ends. If you wife wants to cheer for everything they do let her. She should get to enjoy the sports they do in her way just as you should get to do it your way. Make the most of their sport lives NOW. There's no way to know what they'll want to do a few years down the road but they'll be more likely to stay with sports if they enjoy them.

OP,

My perspective is this. I do not talk about this often, so do know that I am only doing to to help you and your kid. I have two children. Both ran in college, my daughter at a D3 school. My son at a D1 school with scholarship (more on that later).

Both were varsity runners in high school. My daughter was a solid area runner. My son was a state champion and High School All-American. For both of them, I stayed out of the way. I didn't even push them into running. Early on, all their friends were playing soccer, so they did that for a few years, and neither one really liked it. Then, middle school came around and both were moderately successful, but neither one was a star in middle school (in fact, my daughter was better in middle school than my son was). My daughter liked to race and liked to win, but my son was completely invested and into it. He came to me after his 8th grade year of track (where again, he was no star) and told me that he decided he "wanted to be good". He had never talked like that before, and I never even hinted to him that I would be interested in seeing what he could do if he were fully invested. He went to all the summer practices before 9th grade CC, upped his mileage from about 10 MPW in middle school to 45 that first summer, and he started the season with a high 18s race and got down to under 16:30 by the end of the season. It was all massive progress from there.

So, my daughter had the opportunity to run D1, but she was more focused on academics and so she decided to go to an elite D3 school. It was the best fit for her. My son was heavily recruited by all kinds of schools, but mostly by D1 schools. All the offers were different. One would have effectively been a full ride with academic and athletic scholarship combined (he had good, not great grades but a high ACT score), but he ended up going to a D1 school that did NOT give him a full ride athletic scholarship, but the combination of the athletic and academic scholarship he did get was very good, and he liked the coach and the school, so he went there.

The point of all of this is...

Both of my kids got the same hands off approach. My daughter gravitated toward academics as her No. 1 priority, and my son gravitated toward running as his No. 1 priority. My wife and I didn't do anything other than give them some good genes and opportunity. THEY CHOSE DIFFERENT PATHS despite having the same upbringing and given the same attitude about academics and athletics from my wife and me.

IF you have a more hands on approach and your kid either fails to perform well or just decides to do something different, they will ALWAYS feel like they let you down. It just is NOT worth the risk. Yes, it IS possible for some kid out there that a Richard William approach to athletics will lead to fame and fortune, but the vast majority of helicopter parents like that will not see anywhere near that kind of success.

I am convinced to this day that the success my son had was due to the fact that it was all HIM. Kids want to find their own thing, not be tethered to some idea their parent has for them. I just supported him. He and his coaches decided his training, his sleeping, his eating, and he was really the one driving all of that. I just provided for him the good food he wanted, a quiet house when he headed to bed earlier than most kids his age, etc.

All that to say...be supportive and keep your nose out of it as much as you possibly can (and you CAN keep it out a lot).

If you're looking for parenting advice it would be let them have fun and play at of different sports. That is going to work out best for 99.99% of cases.

If you're going to treat your kids like a science experiment and want them to be top level athletes at all cost then that's likely a different conversation. It depends a lot on the specific sport and their body type. If you want them to be great Distance runners they don't need to do any training growing up (just be active). But if you're talking more of a skill sport like tennis, gymnastics, soccer then they need to be practicing that skill from a very young age. You can't start playing any of those sports in high school and go on to being a world champion. Likewise if your kid is freakishly tall or strong or they can throw a baseball 100 mph they can start playing those sports in college and still go pro.

That is good advice. My kids played many sports but all ended up finding their path was through running. You really don't need more than a year to realize your potential in high school while it takes years of dedication in order to become D1 in a skill sport unless you are 7 feet tall or 300 pounds.

My son ran at D2 and another kid who came to me for training at the age of 11 just ran a 3:57 mile for Princeton.

Be patient, find good coaches with an even better environment. Make sure they enjoy the process.

Good luck.

HRE wrote:

Your kids are 6 and 8. Nothing means anything before puberty matters no matter how good they are or aren't now. You mention hoping maybe they'll get a scholarship. Don't. Think about how you'll pay for college. If a scholarship comes along later it's a bonus. Don't get in the way of their enjoyment of a sport. Don't push them into one for your own ends. If you wife wants to cheer for everything they do let her. She should get to enjoy the sports they do in her way just as you should get to do it your way. Make the most of their sport lives NOW. There's no way to know what they'll want to do a few years down the road but they'll be more likely to stay with sports if they enjoy them.

Top notch advice.

Thanks.

If you want them to be runners, get them into soccer as soon as possible. The agility and speed in soccer helps develop kids to be less injury prone later as opposed to just running. As others have said: multiple sports for all around development. Some competition based (team sports) some not. For example get them road bikes (and yourself) and train together for a organized bike tour. Ragbrai(sp?) Ride the Rockies etc. Develop a culture of fitness both serious and fun around your house.

1. Put them into environments where they can find opportunity.

2. Deny them screen time.

Probably the most important thing to teach them at the ages you are talking about is how to have a good attitude and how to be a good teammate. You model that behavior as a parent.