Raising Viking Athletes
Youth Sports Done Right
Evidence-based guidance for parents, coaches & communities
← Back to Athletics & ActivitiesThe Numbers Don’t Lie
America invests more in youth sports than any country in the world. Yet we are losing athletes faster than we develop them. The problem is not investment. It is approach.
70%
Quit by Age 13
Seven in ten kids playing organized sports quit before high school — most citing lack of fun, too much pressure, or cost.
$8K+
Per Year, Per Child
Average annual cost for an active travel sports family. For many, this investment yields no measurable development advantage.
3+
Sports in High School
The majority of Division I college athletes played multiple sports growing up. Early specialization is not the path.
2%
Reach Division I
Only 2 in 100 high school athletes compete at the Division I level. The odds most travel sports parents are quietly betting on are 50 to 1 against.
“We have professionalized youth sports to the point where children are performing for adults rather than playing for themselves. We are optimizing for the wrong outcomes.”
Aspen Institute — Project Play Report
Ages 6–12 · The Foundation Years
Build the Mover First
Before your child becomes an athlete, they must become a mover. Physical literacy — the ability to move confidently and competently — is the foundation on which all athletic development is built. You cannot skip this step.
Canada’s Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) model — now adopted by sports science institutions worldwide — identifies ages 6–12 as the most critical window for fundamental movement skill (FMS) development. During this period, the nervous system is uniquely primed to learn how to run, jump, throw, catch, balance, and coordinate.
Children who do not develop these foundational skills before age 12 encounter what researchers call the proficiency barrier — a point at which physical incompetence drives avoidance. They stop playing not because they don’t enjoy sports, but because they don’t feel capable. Once this barrier is in place, it is extraordinarily difficult to overcome.
The implications for feeder programs are significant: an 8-year-old who develops movement competence through variety and play is far more likely to be a 16-year-old walking onto your varsity roster. An 8-year-old who specializes too early and burns out is not.
“The single greatest investment you can make in your future athlete is teaching them to love movement before they are ever asked to perform.”
Long-Term Athlete Development FrameworkThe ABC of Athleticism
Before tactics, positions, or sport-specific skills — every young athlete needs to develop:
- Agility — change of direction, reaction, spatial awareness
- Balance — static and dynamic, core stability, proprioception
- Coordination — hand-eye, foot-eye, bilateral movement patterns
- Speed — acceleration, deceleration, elastic power
These are not sport-specific skills. They are the raw materials every sport is built from. They are best developed through variety, not repetition of a single sport’s movements.
The Three Development Windows
Understanding where your child is in their development changes everything about how you should be investing your time, money, and energy.
Ages 6–9
FUNdamentals
Variety is everything. No scoreboard matters here. The goal is to develop the ABCs of athleticism through free play, multiple sports, and activities that make movement feel like joy. Specialization at this age is actively harmful.
Ages 10–12
Learning to Train
The most neurologically important window in athletic development. Skills introduced now are encoded more deeply than at any other time in life. Quality coaching and deliberate skill practice during these years pays dividends for a decade. This is not the time to win championships. It is the time to build athletes.
Ages 13–15
Training to Train
Now specialization begins to make sense. The athlete has a movement vocabulary, a competitive identity, and the maturity to handle structured training. This is when focused commitment to a primary sport — while maintaining secondary sports — produces meaningful development gains.
What the Research Shows
The Multi-Sport Athlete
Early specialization is one of the most persistent myths in youth athletics. The data says something different — and the data is not subtle.
Macy Kline
Volleyball · Basketball · Softball · Division I Athlete
🦴 Injury Prevention
Research published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine (Jayanthi et al., 2013) found that early sport specialization is a significant independent risk factor for overuse injury. Athletes who specialize before adolescence place the same movement stresses on developing bodies year-round, with no recovery or variation. The result is stress fractures, tendinopathies, and joint issues that cut careers short before they begin.
⚡ Skill Transfer
Every sport develops something another sport uses. Soccer builds spatial awareness and ball touch. Wrestling builds balance, core strength, and the composure to compete when uncomfortable. Basketball builds footwork and split-second decision-making. Swimming builds lung capacity and stroke efficiency. These are not competing investments — they are compounding ones. The nervous system does not care which sport taught it to accelerate and decelerate. It just gets better at it.
🔥 Staying in the Game
Burnout is the single greatest threat to long-term athletic development — and early specializers experience it at significantly higher rates. When a child’s entire athletic identity is attached to one sport before they are emotionally ready, any setback in that sport becomes a setback to their entire self-concept. Multi-sport athletes maintain broader identities, more diverse social networks through sport, and stronger intrinsic motivation because no single bad season can take everything from them.
“The athletic environments that produce the most elite performers are characterized by early diversity and late specialization — not the reverse. The athletes who sampled widely and specialized late are overrepresented at every level of elite sport.”
Bridge & Toms — Journal of Sports SciencesThe majority of professional athletes in the NFL, NBA, and MLB played multiple high school sports. Roger Federer played soccer, basketball, squash, and table tennis before focusing on tennis as a teenager. Bo Jackson. Deion Sanders. The pattern is consistent across generations and across sports.
What This Means for Holmen
When a Holmen athlete plays football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and throws shot put in the spring, they are not dividing their development. They are multiplying it.
Our coaching staff works across seasons to build complete athletes, not sport specialists. We actively encourage multi-sport participation — not because it is tradition, but because the research is unambiguous.
The athletes who walk into Holmen’s programs having played multiple sports are, on average, more coachable, more physically capable, and more resilient than those who have only ever played one.
Relationships Over Résumés
We are raising the most anxious, most isolated generation in recorded history. Youth sports may be one of the most powerful interventions we have left — if we let it be.
Jonathan Haidt’s research in The Anxious Generation (2024) documents a staggering rise in teen depression, anxiety, and loneliness that correlates directly with smartphone adoption after 2012. The cause is not complexity. It is displacement — screens replaced the unstructured, face-to-face time that human beings need to develop social competence, trust, and belonging.
Youth sports, done right, provide something screens fundamentally cannot: shared struggle. The experience of working toward something hard with other people — losing together, winning together, grinding through a difficult practice together — builds the kind of trust and connection that forms identity. That is not a soft benefit. It is a developmental necessity.
The research on the coach-athlete relationship is equally clear. Athletes who have a trusted adult coach — someone who knows their name, their goals, and their struggles, who holds them accountable and believes in them — show measurably better outcomes academically, socially, and athletically. That relationship is irreplaceable. A screen cannot build it.
“Put your phone away at games. Not for the highlight reel. Because your athlete looks into the stands, and what they see in that moment — you fully present, or you scrolling — is the message they carry onto the floor.”
Holmen AthleticsWhat Sports Provide That Screens Cannot
- Shared struggle and earned triumph
- Face-to-face conflict, resolved in real time
- Trust built through consistency over months and years
- An identity beyond performance — teammate, competitor, Viking
- A caring adult who is not their parent and is not optional
- Peer friendships forged through something hard
Getting the Balance Right
Practice vs. Competition
The United States has largely inverted the optimal ratio of practice to competition in youth athletics. The result is athletes who have logged thousands of game reps but cannot execute fundamentals under pressure because they never slowed down long enough to build them.
✓ What Development Looks Like
- Ages 6–12: 70–80% of organized time in practice and skill work
- Every practice has a clear, specific learning objective
- Scrimmage is a tool within practice, not a substitute for it
- Athletes receive individual coaching feedback, not just team strategy
- Competition frequency is low enough that games feel meaningful
- Practice intensity and complexity match the athlete’s developmental stage
✗ What Travel Sports Often Deliver
- Multiple tournaments per weekend, minimal practice time
- Schedules built around competition calendars, not development plans
- Coaches who evaluate rather than develop — at games, not practices
- Athletes who learn to perform, not to grow
- So many games that competition loses meaning and stakes feel routine
- No developmental progression — just more of the same, repeated
European soccer academies — which consistently out-develop their American counterparts — run four to five practices for every game in youth programs. The AAU basketball model, widely criticized by NCAA coaches and player development researchers alike, delivers the opposite: almost entirely competition, almost no structured practice. American youth baseball runs three times more games than the Dominican academies that produce a disproportionate share of MLB talent.
The pattern is consistent: practice-heavy models produce better athletes long-term. Not because competition is bad, but because skills are built in practice. Games reveal what practice built — or failed to build.
What Makes Practice Meaningful
- One clear skill per session — athletes know what they are learning, not just doing
- Desirable difficulty — challenging enough to require focus, achievable enough to produce success
- Deliberate repetition, not just repetition — mindful execution, not automatic movement
- Scrimmage serves the skill — game situations test what was practiced, not replace the practice
- Developmentally honest — what 8-year-olds need looks nothing like what 15-year-olds need
An Honest Assessment
The Travel Team Question
Travel sports are not inherently wrong. The question is: at what age, for what purpose, and for whom? When parents survey their own reasons for choosing travel programs, “my child wanted to” trails well behind “better competition” and “better coaching” — both of which the research does not consistently support at younger ages.
When It Helps
Travel and club sports can provide genuine value when the timing and purpose are right:
- Ages 13–15 and beyond, when specialization is developmentally appropriate
- When the program prioritizes skill development alongside competition
- When the athlete is making the decision — not the parent
- When it supplements school sports rather than replacing them
- When participation doesn’t create financial stress the athlete absorbs
“The best version of travel sports develops athletes at the right age with the right purpose. The worst version is expensive competition with a jersey.”
Holmen AthleticsWhen It Hurts
The data suggests travel sports are actively counterproductive when:
- The athlete is under 12 and foundational skills are still developing
- Competition frequency outpaces what skill can be built on the practice end
- It replaces multiple sports rather than supplementing one
- The family’s social calendar is a primary driver — the travel is the point
- It creates year-round single-sport exposure before the body is ready for it
- It pulls athletes away from school programs that build program identity and culture
The Honest Question
Ask yourself: if your child asked to stop travel sports next month, would you let them? If the answer is complicated, the program may be more about the parent’s investment — financial and emotional — than the athlete’s development.
Alignment Builds Dynasties
Great programs are not built through recruiting or spending. They are built through a decade of aligned development — where every coach from youth rec through varsity is teaching the same principles, the same culture, and the same standard of effort. Alignment is the dynasty strategy.
The Athlete
- Shows up ready to learn, not just perform
- Brings effort independent of the scoreboard
- Understands that development is the job at practice
- Competes for the team, not the highlight
- Trusts the process when results are slow
The Coach
- Designs every practice with a development intention
- Communicates clear expectations to athletes AND parents
- Evaluates success by athlete growth, not just wins
- Treats every athlete as a person before a player
- Connects program culture from youth through varsity
The Parent
- Understands their role begins and ends at support
- Celebrates effort, not only outcome
- Never coaches from the stands during the game
- Backs the coaching staff in front of their athlete
- Invests in the program before their child arrives
“When a parent tells their child the coach doesn’t know what they’re doing, the athlete is left competing for two different audiences. They will commit fully to neither. The athlete always pays that price.”
Positive Coaching AllianceWhat Breaks Alignment
Alignment breaks when any vertex of the triangle pulls in a different direction. The warning signs are recognizable and they cost programs dearly:
- Parents who undermine coaches privately, then wonder why their athlete doesn’t respond to coaching
- Athletes who compete for playing time, not for their teammates
- Youth coaches who teach different fundamentals than the high school program — erasing years of work when athletes arrive
- A culture where the parent’s sideline behavior differs from the values the program teaches inside the gym
Community Investment
Invest Before They Get Here
Every facility your athlete will compete in, every resource your program has access to, every tradition that defines the Viking culture — someone built that before your family arrived. The question is what you will build for the family behind you.
Elementary
K–5
K–5
Join and Show Up
Join the Booster Club now. Attend games your child isn’t playing in. Learn what the program values. Your investment of time and dollars at this stage funds the experience your athlete will walk into — and you may not see it for years. That is the point.
Middle
6–8
6–8
Understand the Pipeline
Capital projects — scoreboards, facility upgrades, fieldhouse improvements — take 5 to 10 years from concept to completion. If you begin raising money in 8th grade for your child’s high school experience, you may be funding the experience of the athlete behind them. Start now.
Early HS
9–10
9–10
Peak Engagement
Your athlete is now competing. Your community investment is at its highest value. Volunteer. Fundraise. Lead. You benefit every day from what those before you built. Honor that by giving back at full capacity while your family is at the center of the program.
Senior
11–12
11–12
The Legacy Phase
What your family leaves behind when your athlete graduates defines the experience of the next one. The parent who stays involved, stays generous, and stays connected after their athlete is gone is the rarest and most valuable person in any athletic community.
Strong Booster Club involvement is not about having your name on a banner. It is about understanding that great programs are generational projects. The weight room your athlete trains in was paid for by parents who sat where you are now. The scoreboard, the uniforms, the facilities — all of it was funded by community members who invested before their child got there, or stayed invested after their child left.
When you wait until your athlete is a junior to get involved, you are benefiting from the prior decade of investment by families who came before you. That is not wrong. But it is worth naming — and worth asking what your response to it will be.
Get Involved
The Holmen Athletics Booster Club funds equipment, travel, facility projects, and athlete recognition programs that are not covered by district budgets. Every dollar stays local and directly serves Holmen student-athletes.
You do not need to have a child in the program to join. You need to believe in what the program is building.
The Holmen Commitment
We believe youth sports, done right, are one of the most powerful forces for good in a young person’s life. We believe in building movers before athletes, relationships before résumés, and programs that outlast any single season or graduating class. We invite every coach, parent, and community member to align around that vision — not because it is easy, but because it is worth it.