Junior squads learn supplements before they learn dinner

Sixteen year olds can name four powders and cannot describe what a decent evening meal looks like.

Ask a good academy group what they take after training and you will get fast, confident, detailed answers. Ask the same group what they had for dinner last night and the room goes vague. That ordering is not their fault. It is what the adults around them chose to talk about.

Supplements are an easy conversation. They come with a label, a dose, a moment, and a satisfying sense of doing something advanced. Meals are a hard conversation. They involve money, families, cooking, time, a bus home at nine at night, and a fourteen year old who does not like vegetables. Coaches take the easy conversation because it is the one that fits into ten minutes at the end of a session.

The cost is not just that the priorities are inverted, although they are. It is that we teach young athletes a whole model of how performance works. Something small, purchased, taken at a precise moment, in a shiny container. That model tells them the answer is always a product. Follow that logic forward five years and you have someone who will believe the next product too, and the one after that will not be as harmless as protein powder.

There is also a risk conversation that gets skipped. Junior athletes buying from the internet, on advice from a slightly older teammate, with no idea about contamination or testing, is a normal state of affairs at levels well below professional. If we are going to be the people who introduced the topic, we should be the people who cover that part properly rather than leaving it to a supplier's website.

What I would do instead is refuse to have the supplement discussion until the food one has actually happened. Not a lecture. Have them photograph a week of meals with no judgement attached, then sit down and look at it together. The gaps become obvious to the athlete before you say a word, which is far more effective than any presentation.

Then, if a genuine hole survives all that, talk about filling it. Some will. A teenager training six times a week with a long commute has real constraints and a sensible product can help.

Order matters. Teach the meal, then the gap, then maybe the tub. Most academies run that sequence backwards and wonder why the habits do not last.