Every August, parents call in a panic because tryouts are two weeks out and their athlete spent the summer off. Here's why a last-minute crash program is the worst way to get ready, and what a real preseason ramp actually looks like.
Every August my phone starts doing the same thing. Parents call because tryouts are a couple weeks out, their kid spent most of the summer off, and now they want to know if there's a crash program that can get them ready in time.
I understand the panic. Roster spots are limited, the season is real, and no parent wants to watch their athlete show up a step behind everyone who trained. But the honest answer is the one nobody wants to hear in the first week of August: the worst time to get in shape for a sport is the week before you need to be in shape for it.
Here's what I tell the families I work with around South County, and what an actual preseason ramp looks like when it's built right.
Fitness does not respond to panic. An athlete who has been mostly idle for eight or ten weeks has lost conditioning, but that is only half the problem. They have also lost tissue tolerance, and the two do not come back on the same timeline.
You can get a deconditioned kid breathing hard and sweating within a few days. The heart and lungs bounce back quickly. What does not come back that fast is the connective tissue: the tendons, ligaments, and the structures around the knees, ankles, and shoulders that absorb the pounding of sprinting, cutting, and jumping. That tissue adapts slowly, over weeks, no matter how motivated the athlete is.
So when you take a body that has been on the couch and throw it straight into two-a-days plus a frantic training program stacked on top, the tissue is the thing that gives. This is the mechanism behind most of the preseason injuries I see. They are not freak accidents; [most of them are the predictable result of load outrunning preparation](/blog/most-volleyball-injuries-arent-accidents). A rolled ankle or a cranky knee in week one usually traces back to a summer of doing nothing followed by a week of doing everything.
Give it four to six weeks. That is the window where you can meaningfully rebuild conditioning and tissue tolerance without spiking injury risk.
Four to six weeks is enough time to reintroduce running volume gradually, get the joints used to jumping and landing again, and rebuild the strength base that protects an athlete once real practices start. It is also short enough that a motivated athlete can see and feel the difference by the time tryouts arrive. The kids who start a structured ramp in early July walk into August tryouts sharp and durable. The ones who start the Monday before are gambling.
The runway matters more than the intensity. A month of consistent, progressive work will always beat one brutal week, because the whole point is to let the body adapt in the right order.
The early part of a preseason block is about rebuilding the base. Reintroduce general conditioning, movement quality, and controlled strength work before you chase anything sport-specific. This is where you get the ankles and knees comfortable with landing again, and where you rebuild the squat, hinge, and pressing strength that makes an athlete stable on the court. Nothing here should leave them wrecked. The goal is consistency, not soreness.
From there you layer in intensity and speed. Once the base is back, you start adding the things the sport actually demands: change of direction, short sprints, and jumping worked at real intent rather than just grinding out reps. This is the phase where off-season strength gets converted into expressed power, and it is the same principle behind why most athletes never actually get faster. Speed and explosiveness show up when a prepared body is asked to move fast, not when a tired one is asked to do more.
Here is the part parents get backwards. The week before tryouts should be the lightest week, not the hardest.
If an athlete has done the work over the preceding month, the final week is for showing up fresh. You keep the movements sharp, you keep the nervous system awake, and you cut the volume so the body is recovered and ready to perform when it counts. Cramming a bunch of exhausting sessions into that last week does the opposite of what the athlete needs. It buries them in fatigue and soreness right when coaches are watching. Freshness is a performance advantage, and [the recovery side of training is where a lot of that edge actually lives](/blog/your-young-athlete-needs-more-recovery).
Plenty of parents are reading this in early August with two weeks left, not six. If that is you, the answer is not to give up, it is to be smart with the time you have.
In a compressed window, prioritize movement quality and gradual exposure over maxing anything out. Get the athlete moving daily, reintroduce jumping and sprinting in small, controlled doses, and manage soreness so they are not walking into tryouts already beat up. Do not try to make up a lost summer in ten days. You cannot, and forcing it is how kids get hurt. Do enough to knock off the rust, keep them healthy, and let them compete.
Then take the real lesson for next time: preseason preparation starts long before the season does.
The families who stop scrambling every August are the ones who stopped treating training as a seasonal fire drill. When strength and conditioning is something an athlete does year round, adjusted across the calendar so [frequency shifts with the phase of the year](/blog/how-often-should-high-school-athletes-lift-weights), there is no crash program to run. The athlete is always reasonably prepared, and preseason becomes a sharpening phase instead of a rescue mission.
That is exactly how we build development for the young athletes in our [team training program](/services/team-training) here in Affton. We map the year around the sports our athletes play so they show up to every tryout and every season ready to compete, not trying to cram a summer of missed work into the week that matters most.
Our NSCA-CSCS certified coaches design evidence-based programs tailored to your goals. No guesswork, no gimmicks—just results.
Work With Our CoachesIf your athlete looks sharp early and fades in the back half of games, the fix usually isn't more conditioning. It's food. Here's what a young athlete should eat before a game, and across the whole day, to actually perform and recover.
If your young athlete is training six days a week and still stalling, the missing piece usually isn't another session. It's recovery. Here's how overtraining quietly stalls young athletes, and how much rest they actually need to keep improving.
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