What if one of the biggest performance unlocks in youth sports is simply learning to recognize the level you’ve already reached and making the most of it?

Information is everywhere. I’m as guilty of it as any parent. I see a great piece of coaching advice, a training concept, or something interesting on Instagram or Facebook, and immediately forward it to my young athletes. Maybe they’ll see something that clicks. Maybe it’ll give them a different perspective or something they can take into their next practice.

I still think that’s good parenting and good coaching. We should always be looking to expand our knowledge base.

But collecting more information, by itself, doesn’t make you a better athlete.

What really moves the needle, what actually levels you up, is learning to do MORE with what you already know and what you already have.

Building speed, strength, fitness, and technical ability takes time. Years. That’s the reality of development.

But development has another component:  Understanding concepts used by the world’s best athletes can change how you approach the game by your very next practice.

Because those lessons have absolutely nothing to do with physical ability.

The First Pitch

Last week, I was watching the Dodgers play the Brewers in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series when Blake Snell took the mound.

Now, Snell isn’t some rookie trying to find his footing. He’s a ten-year Major League veteran, a two-time Cy Young Award winner, a World Series champion, and one of the best pitchers in baseball. In fact, the last time he’d faced these same Brewers in the postseason, he’d thrown eight scoreless innings and struck out ten batters.

Think about the preparation that goes into a start like this. The scouting reports, studying opposing hitters, working through situations, visualizing pitches, and mentally preparing for one of the biggest games of the year. All the things a professional at that level does to be ready when his name is called.

Then he stepped onto the mound, delivered his very first pitch, and Jackson Chourio absolutely crushed it into the right-center-field seats.

One pitch. Home run. Dodgers down 1–0.

So much for the game plan.

But here’s what caught my attention.

The camera zoomed in on Snell afterward, and I was watching for his reaction. No visible meltdown. None of that all-too-familiar high school self-talk. (“No, no, no! Gawd, I suck…Come on! Hey guys, sorry. My bad!”)

He looked like he’d already forgotten about it. He was already on to the next thing.

A pro.

Snell immediately stepped back in, threw 12 pitches and struck out the side. He then went six consecutive scoreless innings, striking out nine.

Pro level recovery and bounce back.

For many athletes, giving up a home run on the first pitch, on that big of a stage, would affect them down to their soul. But let’s be real. If you’re going to give up a bomb in baseball, make it the first pitch. You’ve still got an entire game to help your team get back into it.

I can’t tell you what Snell was thinking, but watching his reaction, I’d bet his internal dialogue went something like this:

Well crap, that’s not how I visualized it. OK, On to Plan B.

And that was probably the last he thought about that pitch.

Professionalism isn’t the ability to guarantee the outcome you’ve prepared for. It’s the ability to keep performing when reality doesn’t follow your plan.

A Conversation in the Volleyball Stands

A couple of days later, I was sitting in the stands with Coach Marty Smith. We were watching our daughters play volleyball. Marty is one of my favorite coaches to talk sports with. He’s a baseball guy, has coached at all levels and sees things most miss. We got to discussing that Snell outing, and Marty made a point about becoming a professional that has really stuck with me.

“At some point in your career, you realize you’ve made it. That you belong.”

You no longer have to prove that you deserve to be there every time you step onto the field. You stop comparing every performance to some imaginary version of perfection. You’ve been around long enough to understand that mistakes are going to happen, and that one bad moment doesn’t erase everything you’ve done to get there.

It’s a lot like running a successful business. Eventually, you realize the real win is continual growth and improvement. You don’t have to be perfect in every situation to be good at what you do. And that realization is the exact moment when something changes.

You can stop spending so much energy worrying about whether you’re good enough and start putting that energy into actually getting better.

Imagine if we could get that same understanding into our young athletes.

Because the reality is quite the opposite. A kid makes JV and immediately starts worrying about varsity. Makes varsity and starts worrying about becoming a starter. Becomes a starter and starts worrying about college.

And I get it. That’s ambition. It’s natural to want the next opportunity, the next challenge, the next level. I lived this myself as an athlete and still do as an adult. As parents and coaches, we encourage it. We’re constantly looking for ways to help our kids move forward.

But I wonder if we’re overlooking something important in the process.

These athletes are so busy looking toward the next level that they sometimes forget they’ve already MADE IT to the one they’re standing on. They bypass a chance for real development and the opportunity to just own it and master that level before advancing to the next.

Think about that for a minute.

You made the team. You earned your spot. You belong on that field or court. You have an entire season, an entire environment, and an enormous opportunity to develop right where you are.

What if a JV athlete could approach every practice and every game with that same sense of belonging? What if one bad play didn’t become a referendum on whether they deserved their roster spot? What if they could accept mistakes, make adjustments, and get right back to doing what they know how to do?

I suspect we’d see an awful lot more development, and probably a lot more enjoyment of the game.

When the Score Stops Being the Point

I actually got to see another version of this lesson play out over the weekend, and this one hit a little closer to home.

My son Braylon graduated from high school this year. Rather than heading directly into college, he decided to attend a postgraduate development academy to get another year of training and competition under his belt. This weekend, I had the opportunity to watch him compete against an actual college team.

These guys were bigger, stronger, and more developed. They had a couple more years of experience playing at that level, and it showed.

To make matters worse, only seven guys from Bray’s team showed up. He and his boys faced a full college roster of seventeen. Braylon ended up playing eighteen of the twenty minutes, with three different defenders rotating through to work him over.

The physical demands were incredible, and his team got beaten pretty badly. But watching him compete, I was probably prouder of what I saw that day than I had been watching him during his district championship season the year before. He belonged out there. He competed, adjusted, and kept working.

After the game, we talked for a bit, and I told him exactly that. I knew his team had gotten beaten, but I loved the way he’d played. I could see some real development happening. Then he told me something that made the entire 5-hour drive home worthwhile.

He said there came a point in the game when they were down enough that he knew a comeback wasn’t realistically happening. Instead of hanging on to some false hope and getting frustrated with the score, he changed how he approached the rest of the game.

He decided to treat every single possession like practice. He said, “Imagine having a college team show up at your practice and say, hey guys, want to work on a few things? We’d be excited for the opportunity. You don’t keep score. You just get to work against bigger, stronger, more experienced athletes who can challenge you in ways your normal training partners can’t.”

That’s how he decided to approach it. Every rep became an opportunity to test something, learn something, make an adjustment, and get better. It was an entirely different experience because he changed what he was trying to get out of it.

And here’s the part that made me so excited as a parent: I’m not sure he could have done that a year ago.

His physical development is certainly coming along, but what I saw that weekend was something else. A level of maturity and awareness that allowed him to turn a pretty miserable loss into one of the most valuable development opportunities he could have asked for.

That drive home was a good one.

I think Coach Marty would have appreciated that conversation.

You Don’t Have to Be a Professional to Learn From One

Snell, Marty, and Braylon gave me three different perspectives on something I’ve spent years trying to explain through Precision Performance Concepts.

You don’t have to be a professional to benefit from understanding how professionals approach their craft. And… nobody should expect a high school athlete to think, perform, or possess the experience of a ten-year professional. That takes years of development.

But we can absolutely learn from them.

That’s what this website and my books are built around. Taking the concepts and strategies used by elite athletes, explaining how and why they work, and making them accessible to the rest of us.

Much of that information is already out there, often for free. The advantage comes from developing the awareness to recognize it, understanding how it works, and learning to put it into practice.

Your athlete cannot develop another five miles per hour of throwing velocity by Saturday. You can’t build years of strength, speed, or experience overnight.

But you can change how you respond to a mistake, recognize that you’ve already earned your place on the team, stop treating every practice like an audition and start making the most of the opportunity you’ve already earned.

You can even find value in a game you’re losing badly by recognizing the incredible opportunity to test yourself against a better opponent.

And you can begin applying every one of those ideas at your very next practice. That’s a pretty significant performance upgrade that doesn’t require a new training program, expensive equipment, or another year in the weight room.

We spend an enormous amount of time teaching athletes how to get to the next level. Maybe we should spend a little more time teaching them how to BE at the level they’re already on.

Keep aspiring to the next level. Keep building your knowledge and developing your abilities. Just don’t become so consumed with where you’re trying to go that you overlook the opportunity sitting directly in front of you. Because sometimes the biggest performance improvement doesn’t begin with a new drill, another training program, or another year of experience. Sometimes it begins when an athlete looks at the exact same situation they’ve been struggling with and finally understands how to approach it differently.

The next level will always be out there. But there’s an enormous amount of development waiting for the athlete who realizes they’ve already arrived somewhere worth being.

You earned your place. Now do something with it.

Dr. Chad Peters

Precision Performance Concepts

Awareness changes how you see the game. Application changes how you play it.