Last week in Cayman, during our Team Speed event, someone asked why it seems that young athletes today aren’t as coordinated as they used to be — and what we can do to help them.
It’s a fair question. We see it everywhere. Movement looks a little more rigid, less fluid, less connected than it once did. The answer to both questions — the why and the what now — is simple: play.
Kids don’t play anymore. And because they don’t play, they don’t move enough, or in enough different ways, to build coordination.
What Coordination Really Means
When we talk about coordination, we often mean a sport-specific version of it: the ability to hit a three-pointer, accelerate through a gap in the line, or run and jump into a sandpit. But coordination runs deeper than that.
It’s the ability of the system — the body, the senses, the brain — to work together. It’s the integration of perception, decision, and action.
Specific coordination [like hitting or kicking a ball] depends on general coordination — the broader quality that allows us to control movement, adapt to changing environments, and solve physical problems.
Coaches have known this for a long time, even without data to back it up. The research now supports what experience has been telling us for a while.
Less Play, Less Coordination
Over the past generation, play has declined. Kids spend less time outside, less time in groups, and less time moving in unstructured ways.
Research is showing what we’ve all been feeling: when children move less — and move less variably — their coordination suffers.
A 2023 paper in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living found that children who regularly played sports scored significantly higher on motor coordination tests than their less active peers. Another study published in MDPI showed that Italian children in a play-based, multisport program outperformed those in standard physical education on every measure of coordination.
Movement diversity builds coordination; monotony and stillness erode it.
Coordination Is Trainable — and Generalizable
Coordination isn’t fixed. It can be improved through practice, especially when movement variety is high.
A 2025 study on young basketball players found that targeted coordination drills improved balance, rhythm, and spatial awareness. Other work suggests that even without formal “drills,” unstructured play naturally trains these same capacities — often more effectively.
Researchers also talk about “sensitive periods,” particularly between ages 6 and 12, when kids seem especially responsive to coordination and motor-skill development. The evidence for strict windows is weak, but the idea remains useful: the earlier and more varied the movement experience, the broader the capacity later.
Importantly, coordination appears to be a generalizable quality. When we improve a child’s rhythm or spatial control in one context, it often transfers to other contexts. The same underlying control of the body’s parts and relationships supports running, climbing, throwing, and kicking.
In systems terms, coordination is the ability of the organism to self-organize across constraints. The more varied the inputs, the more adaptable the output.
The Coaching Implication: Design for Play
If coordination is generalizable, then we can train it indirectly — not just by repeating sport-specific drills, but by reintroducing diversity and exploration into movement practice.
For coaches, this means:
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Encourage variety: Early in development, expose athletes to different sports, movement patterns, and problem-solving tasks.
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Include unstructured games: Play tag, dodgeball, or balance challenges. These develop timing, rhythm, and spatial awareness without conscious instruction.
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Embed coordination tasks: Warm-ups and small-sided games can include balance, rhythm, or reaction tasks.
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Reward exploration: Let kids find their own solutions. Don’t correct every movement “error.” Variation is the teacher.
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Bring back free play: Even short, unsupervised play blocks before or after training can help coordination flourish again.
The goal isn’t to create perfect movement patterns, but to build flexible movers — athletes who can adapt.
Why This Matters
General coordination forms the foundation for everything else we do in sport. It’s what allows technical skill to develop efficiently, and what makes physical training meaningful.
An athlete with a broader coordination base can learn new movements faster, adjust more easily, and sustain performance longer. One without it may be strong or fast, but brittle — easily disrupted by unfamiliar situations or changing environments.
When coordination is weak, we see it in timing errors, excessive rigidity, and inconsistent rhythm.
When it’s strong, movement looks effortless — because the system can organize itself effectively.
Our job as coaches is to create environments where that interaction can happen.
Back to Play
So when people ask why youth athletes seem less coordinated, we don’t have to look far. They’ve lost the playground, the pickup game, the time and space to explore.
And when they ask what to do about it, the answer is the same one that got us here: play.
Let them move. Let them experiment. Let them fall and recover and figure things out.
Coordination comes from experience: from living inside movement, not just performing it.
The more varied the movement history, the more flexible the movement future.
Let them play.
If you’re serious about building youth athletes who last, adapt and thrive, then consider checking out the new Pocket Guide from my good friend Derek Evely: “A Theoretical Framework for Long-Term Youth Athlete Development.”
It covers play, movement variety, coordination and long-term development in a way that aligns directly with what we’ve discussed here.
You can find it here: ALTIS Pocket Guide — Derek Evely
Give it a look, share it with your coaching team, and let’s build a generation of athletes who are better movers and lifetime learners.
P.S - we also produced a free guide which highlights the 10 most common mistakes in youth development that derail athletes; and shows you how to avoid them.
You can access it by dropping your details below. We'll email the guide right away to your inbox.
