How High School Athletic Departments Fail Multi-sport Athletes (And What To Do About It) | FIT
If you’ve got a multi-sport athlete in your household, you’ve probably seen it firsthand: football season starts creeping in, but your kid is still expected to show up for offseason baseball lifts. Or worse — they’re expected to participate in both volleyball lifts, practice, tournaments AND basketball tournaments & open gym and it’s only July.
This isn’t just frustrating. It’s counterproductive, short-sighted, and completely avoidable. The root issue? A lack of collaboration (maybe even understanding) in high school athletic departments. And when the adults don’t coordinate, athletes pay the price.
If you walked into most high school athletic departments, you’d think they were running separate franchises instead of one unified organization. Coaches hoard athletes like rare Pokémon, offseason workouts turn into turf wars, and somehow the athlete; the actual human being this is all supposedly for, becomes the afterthought.
Let me be clear: this isn’t just about scheduling headaches. It’s about overtraining, burnout, conflicting demands, and, ultimately, underperforming athletes. And trust me — as a performance coach, I’ve seen enough overcooked spaghetti-joint periodization attempts to know when the kitchen’s on fire.
The #1 Rule of Sport Prioritization: In-Season Always Wins
It’s not up for debate. If a sport is in-season or entering preseason, it must take scheduling and training priority — period.
Legendary sports scientist Dr. Tudor Bompa introduced the principle of periodization, which structures training around competitive seasons.
In-season athletes need the most attention and the most recovery. Out-of-season programs should support — not sabotage — that flow.
Real-Life Examples of Scheduling Conflicts:
Football (Fall) vs. Baseball (Spring): Football players shouldn’t be attending baseball lifts in July. That’s a preseason conflict.
Volleyball (Fall) vs. Basketball (Winter): Basketball open gyms during volleyball season? That’s misaligned and unfair to the athlete(s).
Every time an out-of-season sport pulls an athlete away from in-season responsibilities, they increase risk of injury, burnout, and underperformance.
Moreover take football, for example. It’s late summer, and football is in preseason mode (hopefully coming off a proper offseason program) — just weeks away from kickoff. These athletes should be focused on football install, conditioning, recovery, etc.
Why This Matters (Science + Common Sense Edition)
Let’s break it down with some sports science and a little logic…
Fatigue masks fitness. (Shoutout to Dr. Fergus Connolly and Martin Buchheit for drilling this into performance circles.) If an athlete’s central nervous system is fried from baseball lifts/practice/lessons/tournaments in the summer, their speed, power, and decision-making for football plummet. And this example goes the other way as well. The same could be said for the football coach that wants all of their players participating in spring weights/practice/game when the baseball team is making a run for state!
Asynchronous training loads = increased injury risk. When one coach is focused on hypertrophy, another on power endurance, and another on technical skill, etc. Without corddinationing with each other, the athlete is essentially running a triathlon every week without knowing it.
Conflict leads to noncompliance. You want to kill buy-in from athletes and families? Make them choose between sports. They’ll either burn out or stop trusting the process. Both are bad for your “culture.”
True long-term development (LTAD) requires strategic planning across the calendar. This isn’t new. The Canadian Sport for Life model, for example, outlines clear “windows” of trainability. Multi-sport athletes can thrive — albeit one must be much more strategic with in/offseason planning (sports periodization).
Weight Room Wars and Facility Drama
The immiscibility doesn’t end with just practice schedules, it also bleeds into facility management and shared spaces.
It’s September, it’s storming on a Wednesday and football plays on Friday, baseball/softball are already in the indoor hitting, basketball scheduled the weight room but guess what, many modern HS facilities have multi-purpose spaces and the weight room is in the indoor.
So now we have potential 4-5 teams in the indoor all vying for their time and spot in a shared space that wasn’t built or thought out for this purpose.
Who wins? In a properly run department, the answer is: the in-season sport.
Everyone else adapts.
Fall? Football and volleyball get top priority.
Spring? Baseball and softball do.
Winter? Basketball.
Simple, right?
Then why do so many schools run their facilities like the Hunger Games?!
Why Every Athletic Department Needs SOPs Before a Blueprint
Before we talk solutions, let’s be honest… Most athletic departments don’t have systems.
They have habits.
And habits, without oversight or intentionality, turn into arguments and turf wars, overuse injuries, and “that’s how we’ve always done it” nonsense.
You don’t solve that with one good scheduling meeting or a spreadsheet. You solve it with SOPs — Standard Operating Procedures ,the backbone of every successful program, business, or team.
What Are SOPs in Athletics?
SOPs are the unsexy but essential processes that:
Define scheduling hierarchy (in-season > offseason)
Dictate how facility space is allocated
Set training expectations for multisport athletes
Ensure communication between coaching staffs
Standardize weight room access and programming across sports
Clarify which coach (or role) has final authority in shared spaces
Think of them like traffic laws: everyone might be going somewhere different, but we still need rules for merging, right of way, and speed limits; otherwise it's a pile-up.
What Happens Without SOPs?
The baseball coach books the weight room during football install because “he always does.”
Basketball hosts open gym during volleyball matches.
A junior with three sports is in three group chats, each with “mandatory” practices on the same day.
The strength coach gets undercut because skill coaches write their own lifting plans.
Facility use is first-come, first-scream.
This isn’t just inefficient, it’s reckless. It erodes trust, increases injuries, and kills buy-in.
SOPs Build a Foundation for Accountability
With SOPs, coaches can’t plead ignorance. Players aren’t stuck in the middle. Parents don’t have to be the intermediary. And most importantly, every athlete is trained and supported based on their season, their readiness, and their needs.
This is how you systemically set the stage for a true performance system.
The Athletic Director’s Blueprint: How I’d Run It (The FIT Way)
Let’s say the superintendent walked into my gym tomorrow and handed me the keys to an entire athletic department, middle school through high school and said,
“Jamie, fix it.”
Here’s what I wouldn’t do:
I wouldn’t start with hype speeches.
I wouldn’t throw new logos on t-shirts.
And I damn sure wouldn’t let each coach keep running their own rogue programs like it’s the Wild West.
What I would do is this:
We as an entire department would build a true Performance System — one that puts the athlete at the center, aligns the seasons, removes ego from the equation, and creates a structure that benefits every coach (yes you coach, this will improve your quality of life as well), every sport, every season.
Because if the goal is long-term athletic development (and it should be), then every coach in the building becomes a contributor to a bigger system, not just a caretaker of their season.
I’d do what smart systems do:
Standardize what needs to be standardized (like SOPs, scheduling, and weight room use) this is our backbone and argument defuser.
Customize what should be customized (like “sport-specific” needs and individual athlete development) realistically most if not all athletes have similar needs. Many if not all programs should look similar.
And build a structure that doesn’t rely on people “doing the right thing,” but rather, makes the right thing the default.
The FIT Blueprint for Unified Athletic Performance
Quarterly Periodization-Based Scheduling
Seasonal sports get calendar priority
Facility usage set by competitive phase
Offseason sports submit training plans early and adjust around in-season needs
Monthly Coaches Roundtable
Every coach. One table. 30 minutes MAX
Discuss training loads, athlete conflicts, and coordinate intent
Strength and performance staff lead meeting
Unified Athlete Load Tracker
Central tracking of all training sessions
Flag athletes approaching high stress or high volume
Informed coaches can adapt accordingly
Centralized Strength & Performance Oversight
One head of performance oversees all: programming, speed/agility, lifting and recovery
sport coach run performance coaches program if desired
Standardized warm-ups, movement quality, and recovery protocols
Prevents conflicting adaptations and ensures developmental progress
Tiered Offseason Programs
Offseason = build capacity, not burn out
Load matches time of year and athlete’s sport status
Maintenance training if playing another sport; progression training if not
Athlete-First, Coach-Accountable Culture
Coaches don’t “own” athletes. They steward them.
Communication is required.
Success is measured by athlete health, performance, and retention
Final Thoughts: Fixing the System Means Leading It
If your athletic department isn’t functioning as one cohesive unit, then it’s not a department, it’s just a bunch of teams coexisting in chaos.
Want to see fewer injuries, more success, and better buy-in across the board?
Then you need a system.
One that honors the calendar. One that puts the athlete first. One that doesn’t collapse every time it rains.
Ready to Train Smarter
We work with multi-sport athletes, busy professionals, and high-performing programs all year round. If your athlete’s caught in the crossfire of competing priorities, we can help put together a plan and work through their busy schedules.