Josh Potter

So my son had an opportunity to go play with his summer team in the WWBA in Jupiter this weekend. Instead, he decided to play HS football - for the 1st time ever as a Senior - and concentrate on that. Everybody says that being a multi-sport athlete is the ideal, but unless you're Aaron Judge the reality is that trying to do two things - at something above a recreational level - takes way more sacrifice than most people realize. While he's in season for football he's staying on his lifting schedule and staying on top of his calorie intake / weight - the two things he needs to continue to increase his baseball performance. Doing that, with 5 practices and 1 game a week, while getting the right amount of sleep, staying on top of homework and trying to occasionally have some kind of social life is a task in and of itself. The idea of doing all of that football stuff PLUS stacking on 3-4 days a week of throwing (including a bullpen), and 3-4 days a week of hitting - all needed so that you're ready to go be competitive in an environment like Jupiter - is absolutely preposterous. And even if he was able to do all of that, the odds that in doing so he would eventually work himself into excessive fatigue, and that fatigue inevitably would lead to injury, are fairly high IMO. So he decided to shut down on baseball entirely until the HS football season is over. You gotta be honest that there is a very real opportunity cost to this multi-sport thing. He'll be playing football through October and - my guess - maybe into the front part of November. He's shut down on throwing now, and will start on-boarding as soon as the HS football season is over. That'll give us just 4 months of development time before the HS season. What impact will a compressed off-season have? I don't know yet, but I can make some guesses. I don't honestly know if he'll get up to 93-94 this off-season. He's fairly reliably added about 2.5 MPH of throwing velo per year since 2024, but that was only through focusing exclusively on off-season baseball training. We're not doing that this year. And you know what...it's actually fine! This doesn't mean he'll never throw 93-94, or that he'll never hit a ball 105+. It just means if it happens it'll happen later. Which brings it back to the Why. He stopped playing other sports - which was his choice - when he was 13 to focus on baseball. After he finished summerball this year he basically told us he was going to play HS football. We spent A LOT of time talking through the decision: the injury risk, the effect on baseball, the time commitment, etc. But even knowing all of those risks, and the potential costs, he told us he still wanted to play. He felt like focusing on baseball the way that we had for these last several years inhibited his ability to try a new thing. And now - having worked his way to a point where college baseball was a reality - he didn't want to pass up the last chance he would ever have to go do this new thing with his friends and be able to share in that experience with them. And it's been great! He loves playing football. Every day after practice he comes home talking about a new thing he learned, or a new challenge. I'm very confident that this whole experience is *knock on wood* going to inform his perspective about how hard baseball is in comparison to football in a significant sense. Here's what I think is going to happen. The kid who walks into the Driveline gym in November is going to be different from the one who left in August. Not because playing football made him a better baseball player, but because he had the autonomy to make his own decision. We gave him that runway. He made the call. At the end of the day I think the multi-sport conversation often starts by asking the wrong question. It's not "should kids play multiple sports?" It's "what does it cost, who's paying it, and is it worth it?" For our family, this year, the answer was yes.