The speech I’d prepared was equal parts rah-rah and duty to warn, but standing in front of 15 hungry, multisport soccer players on a misty, May-Gray evening I knew I’d have to crank through an abridged version to keep them sitting still. When the kids start pulling their sweatshirts down over their knees? The clock’s ticking.
And by hungry, I mean literally—we had just blitzed through a fast-paced workout and, as the girls sat to discuss our season outline, team goals, and the culture and training environment we wanted to maintain as they enter their freshman and sophomore years of high school, they had pizza, watermelon, and our right back’s famous homemade brookies waiting on a buffet table.
But hungry also in the sense of ambition. Collectively, the team had achieved their goal of earning qualification into a promotion- and relegation-based regional league for the coming 2024 fall season. At the same time, individually, the players are transitioning into the phase where they now want game film and advice on how to create highlight clips; they’re setting up scouting and social media profiles; they have ID camps and showcases on their calendars. In addition to college considerations and wanting to stay on track for roster spots down the road on very competitive high school varsity soccer teams, over ¾ of the players also intend to play at least one if not two other varsity sports.

Over the previous four years, this group of players have been able to develop one scarce asset (all-around athleticism) that serves them well. Over the next 3-4 years, the question becomes how well they manage another pair of other assets which—while boundless back in elementary school—have a diminishing availability with each passing year: time and energy.
The players have been able to develop one scarce asset (all-around athleticism)—over the next 3-4 years, the question becomes how well they manage a pair of other assets which will have a diminishing availability: time and energy. Share on XOpportunity Cost in Youth and High School Sports
“Wow, your girls are REALLY athletic.” If I had a dime for every coach, parent, or opposing player who has said that about my teams, I’d have a stronger Vanguard portfolio. And if I had a dime for every coach or club who has tried to follow a similar multisport model to develop high school athletes…I’d have a tip the Starbucks barista would bombastically side-eye. As this G09/G10 team heads into it’s fifth year, following the three-year span of the inaugural G05/G06 Flex team, they remain a unicorn team within our club and in the region, with a roster made up of girls who also play softball, flag football, lacrosse, volleyball, beach volleyball, field hockey, and run track.
There’s a chicken/egg rabbit hole you *could* go down: do they play multiple sports because they’re very athletic or does their athleticism come from years of playing multiple sports? The answer, though, is simply yes. And more important than debating “which came first” is appreciating the outcome: here’s a group of enthusiastic, super-athletic teenage girls still successfully playing several sports at an age when the attrition rates for players in any one sport are alarmingly high.
Do they play multiple sports because they’re very athletic or does their athleticism come from years of playing multiple sports? The answer, though, is simply yes, says @CoachsVision. Share on XIn our player meeting, to keep the girls from making a mad dash for the brookies the moment I paused, I used a Socratic method where I’d sent infographics to their team group chat and had them all break out their phones while I asked leading questions:
- What were some of the keys to our collective success the prior year?
- What are a few of the qualities and definitions of a good teammate?
- What makes the training environment a place you want to come to week after week?
Also, read aloud the quote on slide number three and tell me what that means to you…

The players answered each question thoughtfully and in their own words—it’s always gratifying to hear that the concepts and foundations that make up our value system have sunk in to the extent where they aren’t simply regurgitated, but woven into an articulate, personal spin. But then I also threw out a final, unfamiliar question: who can tell me a definition of the phrase “opportunity cost”?
Blank stares. Sweatshirts pulled down to shoetops.
At first glance, opportunity cost is the most simple and intuitive concept imaginable—with any decision you make, the upsides of that choice are counterbalanced by the cost of losing out on the best alternatives that your decision then prevents you from doing. It’s also a highly challenging concept to apply—a true assessment of opportunity cost requires projecting yourself into an unknown future and weighing consequences which are colored by cognitive biases, shifting priorities, knowledge gaps, good/bad personal habits, and the outcome of other people’s actions and decisions that you do not control among countless other factors.
In terms of long-term athletic development, the players on my team had deliberately chosen not to play on more standard, specialized “elite” youth soccer teams…and to this point, the opportunity cost of that was minimal: no “ECNL” letters on the sleeves of their jersey or in their IG profiles, but they were still able to play at a competitive, regional club level and had not had to sacrifice other sports and activities to do so.
Here, though, over the coming years is where things do get challenging.

Post PHV, for female athletes the developmental pyramid narrows and the player pool in primary sports gets reduced to those who are also physically talented, technically-skilled, tactically-sound, and mentally driven—and, beyond that, largely those who have been banking years of sweat equity in those sports with highly-competitive, year-round club/travel teams. Although I champion multisport participation and do everything I can to support athletes who want to play as many sports as possible…realistically, in that aforementioned duty to warn role, I also have a responsibility to help them reach their goals and honestly communicate that during the course of that pursuit, they may hit a crossroads where juggling too many sports and teams can be a limiting factor.
Even more challenging? That point will differ by athlete, differ by sport, differ by the schools they attend, differ by coaches within those sports and schools, and differ by the extent to which achieving specific athletic goals even matters to them in the first place.
Changing with the Game: From “Play Everything” to “Be Purposeful”
My older daughter recently graduated as a two-sport varsity athlete from Torrey Pines, a San Diego public high school which, year-after-year, tends to be ranked among the top handful of “sports schools” in California, just behind endowment-flush private schools like Mater Dei, Cathedral Catholic, and St. John Bosco.
In a senior graduating class of ~750, the best female athlete at Torrey Pines was the first female or male athlete in the 64-year history of CIF (California Interscholastic Federation) San Diego to be the CIF Player of the year in three sports: Laurel Gonzalez was the quarterback of the varsity flag football team (CIF Finalists), the striker and primary goal-scorer on their CIF-winning soccer team, and will go on to play lacrosse at Johns Hopkins next year.
Her opportunity cost for playing three varsity sports? None that was apparent on the field.
For my daughter, however, who was always a very good athlete but never that top-half-a-percentile beast of an athlete, there was a definable point heading into her junior year where she could have improved her standing in the team hierarchy within either Torrey’s soccer or softball programs by going all-in and pursuing just one of the two sports on a dedicated, year-round basis (or, alternately, by transferring to a school where she could be a bigger fish in a smaller pond—there are always multiple pathways).
But, for a range of academic and quality-of-life reasons, she made a conscious choice that being a role player for two varsity sports and being able to transition between those two primary activities (plus enjoying her club/travel teams for both sports) was worthwhile enough that it outweighed the opportunity cost: losing that increased training time and focused energy to push for a more prominent role on the varsity team for either sport.

One of the hardest realities for multisport athletes to adapt to is how the consequences and calculus of being a multisport athlete can change…and, oftentimes, without them recognizing that change until it’s already passed them by. Up until the age of 14-15, the primary challenges for multisport athletes are on the administrative side: managing the demanding schedules, high costs, extensive travel, and conflicting activities in a youth sports environment dominated by year-round, specialization-based club/travel sports.
One of the hardest realities for multisport athletes to adapt to is how the consequences and calculus of being a multisport athlete can change—oftentimes, without them recognizing that change until it’s already passed them by. Share on XGiven those administrative challenges, the primary consequences also tend to be administrative and in form of a coach-imposed punishments—if you miss practices or games for my sport while playing another, I will reduce the playing time that you would otherwise merit on the basis of ability and performance in order to send a disciplinary message and compel you not to miss my games.
At some point, however, that coach-imposed punishment can shift to a sport-imposed one—a coach doesn’t have to “bench” a player for missing team activities if, as an outcome of constantly missing team activities and the corresponding developmental benefits, that player fails to progress and allows others to pass them by in the performance-based team hierarchy.
In a competitive environment, to remain the same is to regress.
Being a multisport athlete is awesome; it is not easy. On the soccer pitch, coaches frequently repeat the phrase “check your shoulders,” which specifically reminds players to see opponent’s movements in their blind spots and generally reinforces the idea of having total awareness of the field of play.
Multisport athletes do not need to do the exact same things their specialized peers/opponents are doing—but, they do need to regularly check their shoulders and ask: “how am I going to continue getting better in all of my sports at the same rate as those peers and teammates who are locked in on getting better month after month?” As many doors as I have seen opened for multisport athletes through their overall competitive abilities, I have also seen doors close too early for players who did not have a purposeful plan to continue improving across multiple sports and did not appreciate the opportunity cost of their choices.
To stay competitive and keep progressing across a four-year high school career (and beyond), three key questions every multisport high school athlete should ask are:
1. For the sports I want to play, how compatible are the high school seasons and the club/travel seasons?
Math is fair: 1+1=2. Life and sports are not always fair, and 1+1 does not always equal the same 2 when pairing sports.
Here in San Diego, a reasonable number of ECNL, GA, and ECRL soccer players also compete in speed and power events for their high school track teams in the spring; there are, however, comparatively few elite/varsity soccer players who compete for their cross-country teams in the fall. To some extent, that has roots in fundamental athletic make-up: endurance is a useful supporting quality for soccer but not a game-changing one, whereas dominant players impact the shape of the game with speed, power, coordination, timing, and explosiveness.
More than relative athletic qualities, though, for soccer players the opportunity costs of a cross-country season and that of a track season are entirely different. The fall cross country season is time-consuming and fatigue-inducing, with a weekly load of training and meets from August through November that leave precious little time or energy to participate in a fall club soccer season.
August through November, however, is the most crucial stretch for most club soccer teams, encompassing late summer tournament/showcase play, the fall league season, and the year’s longest sustained run of consistent weekly training—this is the stretch of time where good soccer players get better at playing soccer. Missing all or most of that stretch is…a costly regression.
Spring track and field? Soccer players will have already set their foundation for the playing year by competing through their fall club season and then playing the full high school soccer season—outside of those teams competing for playoff spots in elite leagues, even at the more ambitious levels of club soccer the spring season tends to be less demanding and more accommodating than the fall. Beyond that, the track events most soccer players gravitate toward are less globally fatiguing than the weekly mileage demands of cross country.
The opportunity cost of a high school track season for soccer players? Reasonably low, provided good communication exits between the athletes and coaches involved.
For soccer players in Southern California, the same situation is also true of fall field hockey vs. spring lacrosse. It’s not in any way “fair” that a high school field hockey season is far more disruptive and attaches a higher opportunity cost than a spring lacrosse season…but the reality is that a female soccer/lacrosse player has a far smoother developmental path through high school than a female soccer/field hockey player.
Be purposeful: Some version of this scheduling calculus will play out for any multisport athlete in factoring the peak and prime seasons for high school and club sports.
2. What are the energy demands of the sports I want to play and are there secondary athletic benefits from participating?
Why are softball and baseball good options for multisport athletes? Unless you are pitching or catching, the sports are not physically draining. Time-consuming? Sure. Mentally challenging? Absolutely. Expensive? How much you got? Yep, they’ll take it. But in terms of recovery, a player who played 4-5 games in left field or at second base over the weekend is not physically wrecked come Monday morning. This past spring, my daughter could drive straight from an afterschool varsity softball game to an evening training with her ECRL soccer team and hit the ground running…which she never could have done had she instead been competing in, say, the school’s spring gymnastics season.
Better yet, for soccer players who log A LOT of minutes for their club and/or high school teams, spending a couple months out on the outfield grass and chilling in the dugout is a great deload from all the sprints, decels, collisions, and non-stop pounding on the turf.
Why might softball/baseball be less valuable for multisport athletes?
After the general movement literacy, sports IQ, and spatial awareness learned by playing for years at the youth level, for older teens, practicing and playing softball and baseball don’t improve a whole lot outside of specific skill in those sports (unlike, say, the obvious transfer of jumping ability from volleyball to basketball). If an athlete needs to improve speed, power, coordination, or technical skill to remain competitive in another sport, a high school season out on the diamond comes at the expense of time to develop those needed qualities.
The next half of that question is also program specific. Do the sport coaches simply take the best players available and write them into the lineup for whirlwind 10-week season or does the program have a method and system for developing athletes over the course of time? A few months ago, one of my longtime softball co-coaches sent me a video of her son, a freshman at Torrey Pines, banging a high outside pitch for a home run on a partial swing where he didn’t come close to full extension. That clip came with a note that the baseball coach had sent thank you messages to the school’s football coaches for that bomb—the ability to muscle that pitch over the fence was largely due to her son being part of the football team’s comprehensive, year-round lifting program.
3. What are the participation rates and player pathways for the sports I want to play?
This is the most challenging question for a couple reasons:
- The answers vary widely by school and by sport and unless a player has older siblings…information can be lacking to help athletes choose the right path and for parents to help support those decisions. Some schools are field hockey powerhouses where competent players will struggle to make the varsity team and at other schools it can be a sport where any kid who wants to play, can. At some schools it’s harder to make the varsity lacrosse team than the varsity soccer team, and vice-versa.
- There’s a pragmatic side to looking at a sport by participation rates, but success in sport over time depends on passion, not pragmatism. You can look at participation rates and decide there’s a more clear path to play 4 years of high school water polo than soccer…but like all sports, water polo is hard and if you quit because you don’t love early mornings in the pool, you would have been better off battling it out for a spot on the soccer pitch or finding less competitive versions of soccer to keep active in the sport.
Are the sports you want to play cut or no-cut? If they are cut sports, are a large number of freshmen cut from the programs? In which case, the 3-4 months prior to the tryouts for that sport are absolutely critical to be in top form, because MJ-legend aside…nowadays, players cut from their high school teams as freshmen rarely try out again as sophomores. More often, they give up on both the school and club version of that sport because it feels like the end of the line.
Is the program vertically integrated with a developmental system in place, or are there large roster Freshman/Novice and Junior Varsity teams of players who are essentially on a separate track from the Varsity team? This is a particularly dodgy one—you want to celebrate and support players making ANY school team, it’s exciting and an important part of the high school experience. And this will again differ hugely by school and by sport. But the reality is that while there may be an avenue for athletes to play for their first couple years of high school, those players may not be on a course to play legit minutes for (or even make) their varsity teams—and, beyond that, may not even be fully aware that they are not on course to play legit minutes for their varsity teams. In which case goal-oriented players need to find a way to get onto that track sooner rather than later.
How You Get Better Is Different for Everyone, But Everyone Needs a Plan to Get Better
The duty to warn part of my speech was shorter than the rah-rah portion, largely because we were there to build enthusiasm for the coming year and not throw cold water on it; but, also, because our role as coaches is to provide our athletes the tools to make better choices, not to make choices for them.
Be purposeful.
That means having a priority system, calculating opportunity costs, and when those costs come due, being willing to pay those costs with eyes wide open. Speaking to my soccer team, I passed along a few of the recurring mistakes I’ve seen over the past decade:
- Prioritizing whichever sport has the coach with the harshest discipline – Although not uncommon, this is the opposite of calculating true opportunity costs and is just a flinch reaction to an abusive hard cost. I once had a soccer player with an ‘old-school’ travel softball coach who broke his players down, berated them, and if they ever missed a practice or game, buried them so deep on the bench they couldn’t see their way back out. For her, that made the calculation a no-brainer: never miss softball and deal with any consequences for missing soccer since I was more flexible. Except, she ultimately quit softball because it wasn’t fun getting yelled at all the time and then she washed out of soccer because she’d fallen so far behind the level of play by always missing everything for softball.

- Prioritizing the first sport in the academic year – High school can be overwhelming and in a state of overwhelm, a natural way of ordering tasks/priorities is to approach it like a punch-list: start by completing the first indicated task, cross that off, and then move on to the next. But calculating opportunity cost requires projecting yourself into the future—if a spring sport is YOUR sport, that needs to always be part of the accounting and addressed in some way in the preceding seasons.
- Prioritizing a less competitive “safety sport” – This goes back to the earlier discussion of pragmatism and also turns the concept of opportunity cost upside down because it calculates for the wrong opportunity. Again, opportunity cost is recognizing that the upsides of a choice are counterbalanced by the cost of losing out on the best alternatives that your decision then prevents you from doing. I have had several athletes who played a second sport going in to high school largely as a hedge, providing a fallback Plan B in case things didn’t pan out with their primary sport. But, then the opportunity costs of that second sport were steep enough to derail their primary sport—and they didn’t enjoy their safety sport enough to keep playing it and so ended up done with athletics entirely.
- Not prioritizing anything – By virtue of genetic physical talent, some youth athletes have the sense of entitlement that inheritance brings and are certain that success comes simply by rolling up to the field. Most of us who have played or coached high school sports know this athlete and tell cautionary tales about them—the one who was the best at everything, up until they weren’t. And when that day came, they didn’t have the habits, tools, or a plan in place to change their downward trajectory.
How much of this did my players internalize? Time will tell. For the final slide on their phones, they discussed the meaning of the phrase “the journey is the reward”—as with the other slides and sayings, the girls put this concept into their own words, recognizing the importance of genuinely appreciating the moment that you are in and that the entirety of the process is of greater value than any one specific outcome. And, with that, they were off to go fill their plates.
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