Every Athlete Needs a Training Plan.  This One's for the Heart.

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Parent, I’m one of you, and I know you didn't sign your children up for travel ball, club soccer, or AAU basketball with the objective of earning NIL dollars in college or putting them on a path to go pro. You signed them up because you believed sport could build something valuable in them for long term living: character, resilience, teamwork, faith. You intended the lessons learned in competition to transfer into the rest of your child’s life: how your athlete handles failure, treats opponents, responds to authority, and ultimately understands his or her inherent worth.

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The reality of what happens when sport becomes the organizing foundation of a young person’s life is sobering. Reliable studies show that approximately 70 percent of children quit organized sports by age 13, and the number one reason they give is that it stopped being fun. What stole the fun? In most cases, the pressure from coaches, from peers, and most painfully, from the people driving them to practices and traveling with them to weekend tournaments. Research from the Aspen Institute's Project Play found that early sports specialization, now the norm rather than the exception, is directly linked to higher rates of overuse injury, burnout, and anxiety in adolescent athletes. The American Academy of Pediatrics has formally recommended that children avoid single-sport specialization before age 15, a recommendation that the current travel sports industry, and even local school athletic departments, have made very difficult to follow.

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The psychological toll is equally well-documented. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that 40 to 50 percent of youth athletes feel stressed due to sports-related pressures. Multiple studies published in sport psychology journals found that athletes whose parents tied love and approval to performance outcomes reported significantly higher levels of anxiety, lower self-esteem, and greater likelihood of quitting sport altogether. The message absorbed by a child who only hears praise after a win and silence after a loss is not motivational. It is devastating, and it follows them well beyond the final buzzer.

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The financial dimension compounds the pressure. American families now spend an average of $2,000 per child per year on youth sports, and for families with children in elite travel programs, that number frequently exceeds $10,000 annually, with some programs demanding $20,000 or more! A 2025 New York Life Wealth Watch survey found that families spend an average of $3,000 annually on youth sports with 64 percent reporting rising costs and many making significant financial trade-offs. A CNBC report citing separate research found 11 percent of families have even considered going into debt to fund their children’s participation in sports. Meanwhile, the odds of a high school athlete earning a Division I scholarship remain below 2 percent in most sports, and the odds of a professional athletics career are a fraction of that. The investment being made is real. The return being imagined is, for most families, a statistical fantasy.

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None of this means sport is the problem. Sport at its best remains one of the most powerful developmental environments a young person can inhabit. But sport without a greater purpose, when it becomes an end in itself, the primary source of a child's identity and worth rather than a means of developing it, has a well-documented tendency to produce exactly the opposite of what parents hoped for when they first laced up their child's cleats: anxious, burned-out, identity-fragile young adults who defined themselves entirely by an athletic career that ended before they turned twenty.

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Beyond the physical and psychological toll on the athlete, the travel sports machine exacts a quieter but equally serious cost on the family itself. When weekends disappear into tournament schedules from September through June, what disappears with them is not just time. It is the unstructured, unhurried family life that researchers increasingly identify as essential to healthy child development. Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has documented extensively that unplanned, child-directed free time is not a luxury, it is the primary environment in which creativity, emotional regulation, and genuine friendship develop. The over-scheduled athlete, moving from practice to tournament to showcase and back again, is often the most activity-rich and experience-poor child in the room. They have seen the inside of a hundred hotel lobbies and almost none of the inside of neighborhood homes. They have teammates but increasingly few friends outside the sport. They have schedules but diminishing margins…for rest, for reading, for the kind of boredom that quietly produces imagination.

The academic cost is similarly underreported. One survey found student athletes participating in year-round travel programs miss an average of 30 or more school days per year due to competition and travel, and that number does not account for the homework left undone in the back seat of a minivan at 11pm on a Sunday night, or the cumulative exhaustion that follows a child who competes on Saturday, drives home Sunday, and sits in a classroom Monday morning running on four hours of sleep. Teachers consistently report that their most athletically committed students are among their most academically distracted, not because they are less capable, but because the bandwidth simply is not there.

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And then, perhaps most importantly, there is the cost to the marriage. Research published in the Journal of Marriage and Family has found that couples who report the highest levels of schedule conflict such as competing demands, chronic time scarcity, insufficient time alone together, show measurably higher rates of marital dissatisfaction and conflict. The travel sports calendar is, for many families, one of the most reliable generators of exactly that kind of schedule conflict: one parent in the stands in Kansas City while the other manages school pickups and dinner at home, finances strained by registration fees and hotel rooms, weekends that were once the primary recovery time for a working marriage now consumed entirely by logistics. The families most deeply invested in their child's athletic future are frequently the families spending the least amount of time together as a family, a dangerous paradox that rarely announces itself until the season is over and the distance that accumulated is harder to close than anyone expected.

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Somewhere between the numerous weekend tournaments and the social media highlights, you may have wondered whether the sport is building the child you hoped for, or unknowingly replacing the values you have spent years trying to instill at home. The culture your child is absorbing in athletics is not neutral. It has a curriculum. If you are not being intentional about what is being taught, the culture will teach its own lessons by default, and those lessons are not the ones you drove four hours to a tournament hoping your child would learn.

Sport gives you something rare: a front-row seat to your child's character under pressure. You watch how they respond to a bad call, how they treat a struggling teammate, how they carry themselves after a loss. That proximity is a gift, and it is an opportunity. The athletic arena, for all its complexity and cultural noise, remains one of the most accessible and natural platforms for a parent to have the conversations that matter most. Not lectures. Conversations, sparked by what just happened on the field, sustained by a question asked on the drive home, deepened over time into the kind of faith that belongs to your child and not temporarily borrowed from yours.

In Christ We Play was built for exactly this moment in our sports culture…the gap between the sport your child loves and the faith you want to anchor them in. You do not need a theology degree to use it. You just need ten minutes, a car ride, a dinner table, a bedtime routine, and the willingness to ask a question and listen to the answer. The discussion questions, athlete and coach quotes, Scripture, and weekly challenges in this book are designed to spark exactly those conversations, the ones that matter long after the athletics “career” is over.

The Apostle Paul writes in Acts 17:28 that in Christ "we live and move and have our being." For the Christian family, that is not just a Sunday morning truth. It is a weekday afternoon practice truth, a Saturday tournament truth, a postgame-loss-in-the-parking-lot truth. Your children are not called to set their faith aside when they lace up their cleats and pick it back up when they come home. They are called to compete with the spiritual reality of who they are declared to be in Christ shaping both why they play and how they play. Helping them understand and live that out is one of the most significant things you will do as a parent, and it does not require a seminary degree or a coaching certification. It requires intentionality and the right tools.

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In Christ We Play began as a ten-minute-per-practice devotional curriculum used by coaches at Providence Christian School of Texas, where I served as Athletics Director. Those coaches committed a small slice of each practice to the questions, Scriptures, athlete quotes, and prayers that make up this series. The fruit exhibited in the young athletes' lives was undeniable. They still use it at Providence today. But what worked in a team setting works equally well, arguably better, in a family one. A dinner table. A car ride. A quiet Sunday evening before the week begins again. The content in each week's devotional requires no special training to lead. It simply requires a parent willing to open the conversation and trust that God will do what He has always done with His Word: use it in the hearts of all who hear and internalize it. Do not be surprised if the content shapes you as much as it shapes your child.

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What follows is a full year's worth of that content: 52 weeks of Scripture, discussion questions, athlete and coach quotes, and closing prayers designed to walk your young athlete through a practical, understandable practice of what it means to follow Jesus in the middle of a competitive life. The goal is not information. It is formation. Along the way, in addition to weekly devotionals, you will read expanded stories of how a known professional football coach’s financial ruin became the turning point of his faith, how a legendary baseball player found restoration after addiction destroyed everything, and how a beloved sportscaster coached his broadcast team with terminal illness. These are not cautionary tales; they are invitations to learn and grow. They encourage the slow, steady shaping of a young person's character, identity, and faith into something that will hold up under every pressure sport and life can produce, long after the final whistle blows.

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The most important thing your children will carry out of their athletic career is not a trophy, a school record, a scholarship, or a pro sports career, even if those things are achieved. It is the answer to the question every young person eventually must answer for themselves: Who am I, and what am I playing for? This book exists to help you help them find the answer before the world gives them one.  

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– Wes Boyd (Former Athletics Director and Coach at The Providence Christian School of Texas) 

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For Parents: How to Use This Devotional

Series with Your Young Athlete

 

You do not need a classroom or a whiteboard to use this material. You need the ordinary moments you already have, and the willingness to use them intentionally. 

 

The setting does not matter. The consistency does.

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A dinner table where phones are face-down. A fifteen-minute drive to Tuesday practice. A quiet moment at bedtime after a tough loss or disappointing practice. These are not inferior substitutes for a formal devotional setting. For many teenagers, they are superior to one. Adolescents typically open up with honest, vulnerable conversation in informal settings. They rarely respond well to a frontal approach like sitting down, and telling them, “We are going to talk about your faith.” They will often go surprisingly deep in a conversation that begins casually, on the go, when something else is nominally happening. The car is one of the most underrated discipleship environments ever invented. Use it.

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Each week's content is designed to be broken into pieces rather than consumed in a single sitting. A suggested rhythm that works well for families:

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Sunday/Monday — Read the week's opening athlete or coach quote aloud at dinner or share it in a family group text. Introduce the topic for the week. Discussion is not required. Just plant the seed.

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Tuesday/Wednesday — On the way to school or practice, ask one of the week's discussion questions. Then listen more than you talk.

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Thursday/Friday — Share the week's key Scripture if your athlete has not already encountered it. Ask a simple question like: "What do you think that means for how you competed this week?"

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Saturday — Close the week by reading the week’s Challenge and Prayer together or praying it yourself over your athlete before they fall asleep.

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Four touch points. Roughly fifteen to thirty minutes across the entire week. That is the investment. On specific weekly topics your young athlete enjoys the discussion, take an additional week to cover the content.  The return compounds over fifty-two weeks in ways you will not be able to fully measure, but you’ll see the fruit grow in your children’s hearts.

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What to do when your child resists.

 

They will resist. Not always, and not forever; but at some point, possibly at numerous points, your teenager will roll their eyes, give a one-word answer, or simply refuse to engage. This is not a sign that the material is not working. It is a sign that you have a normal teenager.

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Do not mistake silence for absence. The quote heard at the dinner table on Monday and apparently ignored is often the quote being quietly processed on Thursday. The Scripture that received a shrug is frequently the one that surfaces, unprompted, in their own words, six months later in a conversation you did not expect. You are not failing when your child does not respond visibly. You are farming. Farming requires planting seeds you cannot yet see, in soil that does not yet look like it is doing anything, trusting that the One who tends the growth and knows what He is doing.

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When resistance is high, reduce the pressure and keep the presence. Stop asking questions for a week. Simply read a quote, make a brief observation about it yourself, and leave space. "I read something this week from Scottie Scheffler, and I keep thinking about it…he said his identity isn't in his golf game, it's in who God says he is. I find that an interesting comment from the #1 ranked golfer in the world.” Then stop. You are not lecturing. You are thinking out loud next to your child. That is a fundamentally different posture, and teenagers can feel the difference immediately.

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The goal is conversation, not curriculum.

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This book is not a course to be completed. It is a framework for the ongoing conversation every Christian parent wants to have with their young athlete but rarely knows how to start. You do not need to cover every discussion question. You do not need to assign the memory verse. You do not need to finish every week before moving to the next one. What you need is to keep showing up, in the car, at the table, at the door of their room, with genuine curiosity about what your child thinks and authentic willingness to share what you are learning alongside them.

The most powerful thing this book can do is not teach your child theology. It is meant to give you and your child a shared language, a common vocabulary of faith, drawn from athletes they respect, grounded in Scripture, returned to week after week, that makes the important conversations feel less like interruptions and more like the natural continuation of something already in progress.

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That is worth utilizing fifteen to thirty minutes a week. Why not start today?!