Age App. Ex and Sports Drill

Youth Health and Wellness

Science + Experience:
The Smart Way to Guide Young Athletes

Why Science Matters in Youth Sports?

Blending Evidence and Experience for Safer, Smarter Decisions

As a parent or coach, you care deeply about helping your athletes grow, stay healthy, and enjoy sports for a long time. You rely on your experience—what you’ve tried, what your coaches taught you, and what “seems to work.”

Experience is important.
But experience alone is not enough.

Scientific research gives us the “bigger picture” that no single person can see on their own. When we put science + experience together, we can make better decisions about training, recovery, and injury prevention (Sackett et al., 1996).

Quick Takeaways (For Busy Parents & Coaches)

Your experience is valuable—but it’s based on a limited number of athletes you’ve seen.
Scientific studies look at hundreds or thousands of athletes and follow them over time.
Blending research + real-world experience helps you weigh risk vs benefit more accurately.
“No one got hurt when I did it” does not automatically mean the training is safe.
Evidence-based decisions help kids perform better and stay healthier now and in the future (Soligard et al., 2016).

Why Experience Alone Can Be Tricky

Most of us start with what we know:

“I did this drill when I was young and I turned out fine.”
“Our team has done this conditioning for years and nobody got hurt.”
“I learned this from my old coach, and it worked.”

These experiences matter, but they are based on a very small sample size—maybe a few teams, a few seasons, or even just your own body.

The problem with relying only on experience

You only see the athletes who stay with you—those who quit or got injured later may not be in front of you anymore.
You may not know if someone developed pain or injury years later, after they stopped playing for you.
Our brains are biased—we remember the dramatic success stories or scary injuries, but not the quiet “almost injuries” or long-term patterns (Kahneman, 2011).

In other words, experience is real, but incomplete.

What Science Adds: The Bigger Picture

Scientific studies are designed to answer questions that one coach—or even one club—cannot answer alone.

Research can:

Look at hundreds or thousands of athletes, not just 20 on a team.
Compare different training methods in a controlled way to see what truly reduces injuries or improves performance.
Follow athletes over months or years to see the long-term effects (Bahr, 2016).
Help us understand the true risk vs benefit of certain drills, loads, and schedules (Soligard et al., 2016).

For example, injury-prevention warm-up programs like FIFA 11+ were studied in large groups of youth players, and research showed they can reduce injuries by about 30–50% (Soligard et al., 2008). No single coach, from their own experience alone, could reliably see that pattern.

“No One Got Hurt” vs “This Is Actually Safe”

A very common belief is:

“We’ve always done it this way and no one got hurt, so it must be safe.”

Unfortunately, that’s not how injury risk works.

Important reality checks

Injury risk is like probability, not a yes/no switch. You can do something risky and still get lucky many times (Bahr, 2016).
Some kids are naturally more resilient; others are quietly “barely hanging on.”
Problems like knee pain, back pain, or overuse injuries may appear later, when training volume increases, or as the athlete gets older (Bahr & Krosshaug, 2005).
You might never hear about those injuries if they happen after they leave your team.

So “no one got hurt that you know of” does not equal “safe.”
Just like driving without a seatbelt—nothing bad happens until the day it does.

This is exactly why we need research: to see patterns across many athletes and many seasons, not just what happens in one team or one year.

How Evidence Helps You Weigh Risk vs Benefit

As a parent or coach, you are constantly making decisions:

Should my child play on two teams at the same time?
Is this strength program safe for a 10-year-old?
How much training is “too much” at this age?
Is early sport specialization a good idea or a risk?

Evidence-based practice gives you tools to evaluate these questions.

Research shows, for example, that:

Well-supervised strength training for youth can be safe and beneficial for performance and injury prevention (Behm et al., 2017).
Neuromuscular warm-ups (balance, landing technique, hip and core strength) reduce common injuries like ACL tears and ankle sprains (Soligard et al., 2008; Soligard et al., 2016).
Early heavy specialization and excessive training volume are linked with increased injury risk and burnout (Jayanthi et al., 2015).

When you combine this evidence with your understanding of the athlete’s personality, schedule, stress, and recovery, you can make decisions that are both smart and personalized.

Science + Experience: Not Either/Or, But Both

Sometimes people worry that “following the science” ignores their personal experience or coaching style.

In reality, evidence-based practice has three parts (Sackett et al., 1996):

Best available research
Clinician/coach experience and expertise
Athlete and family values and goals

All three are important.

Science keeps us from repeating mistakes and using outdated or risky methods.
Experience helps us adapt the research to the real world and to each unique athlete.
Athlete and family preferences keep the plan realistic and meaningful.

When all three are working together, we can support athletes in a way that is safer, more effective, and more sustainable.

Practical Ways Parents & Coaches Can Use Evidence

You don’t have to read every scientific paper to be “evidence-based.” Here are simple ways to start:

Ask “What does the research say?” when new training ideas or trends appear.
Look for programs that have been studied, like structured warm-ups or injury-prevention protocols.
Be cautious of extremes: “no pain, no gain,” “play through everything,” or “this secret drill fixes everything” are red flags.
Check your bias: if you feel strongly about a method because it “worked for you,” ask, “Is this safe and appropriate for this age and this athlete?”
Partner with healthcare professionals (PTs, ATs, sports medicine doctors) who practice with an evidence-based mindset.

Final Message to Parents & Coaches

Your role is powerful.

By combining:

Your care and experience, and
High-quality scientific evidence

you give young athletes the best chance to:

Stay healthy
Enjoy sports longer
Grow into strong, confident movers for life

Experience tells you what you’ve seen.
Science tells you what tends to happen across many athletes.
Together, they help you move from “we hope this is okay” to “we have good reason to believe this is safe and effective.”

Scientific References:

Bahr, R. (2016). Why screening tests to predict injury do not work—and probably never will. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 50(13), 776–780.
Bahr, R., & Krosshaug, T. (2005). Understanding injury mechanisms: A key component of preventing injuries in sport. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 39(6), 324–329.
Behm, D. G., et al. (2017). Youth resistance training: Updated position statement paper from the National Strength and Conditioning Association. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 31(12), 1–28.
Jayanthi, N., et al. (2015). Sports specialization and injury risk in young athletes: Evidence from a large clinical database. The American Journal of Sports Medicine, 43(4), 794–801.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Sackett, D. L., et al. (1996). Evidence based medicine: What it is and what it isn't. BMJ, 312(7023), 71–72.
Soligard, T., et al. (2008). Comprehensive warm-up programme reduces injury in young female footballers: Cluster randomised controlled trial. BMJ, 337, a2469.
Soligard, T., et al. (2016). Sports injury prevention: A systematic review of systematic reviews. Sports Medicine, 46(6), 769–790.