How to Motivate High School Athletes (A Hummer Helped)
From the Field
How to Motivate High School Athletes
(A Hummer Helped)
Teenagers don’t respond to lectures. They respond to experiences they didn’t think were possible. After 30 years working with high school athletes, here’s what I’ve learned about keeping them engaged.
By Trace Pate · April 2026
A few years back, I pulled my Hummer to the top of a hill at Farragut High School, handed a team battle ropes attached to the trailer hitch, and told them to pull it up.
They looked at me like I had lost my mind.
Twenty minutes later, they had done it. Laughing, yelling, completely spent, genuinely proud. Nobody was checking their phone. Nobody was going through the motions. Every single one of them was all-in, because I had given them something they had never done before and never thought they could do. When it comes to high school kids, that’s the job.
The Attention Problem Is Real
High school athletes are not miniature adults. They don’t sit still for abstract concepts. They don’t get fired up by a lecture on periodization. They don’t respond to “trust the process” when the process looks the same every single day and they can’t feel themselves getting better.
If you’re a strength coach working at the high school level and you’re not thinking constantly about how to keep the program fresh and compelling, you’re going to lose them. They’ll show up and go through the motions, but you’ll have lost the thing that makes the training actually work — full engagement and genuine effort.
The best high school training sessions I’ve ever run didn’t feel like training. They felt like events. The kids talked about them afterward. They told their teammates who weren’t there. They showed up the next session wondering what was coming. That’s what you’re after.
“You don’t need gimmicks. You need novelty with purpose. Every creative thing I’ve done in the weight room has had a real training reason behind it — the kids just didn’t feel like they were training.”
Giant Hammers and Tractor Tires
At Knoxville Christian School, we brought in tractor tires and those big rubber sledgehammers. Massive things. Kids who had never touched them took one look and immediately wanted to try. Nobody had to be told twice. The tire flip, the hammer slam — there’s something primal about it that bypasses whatever resistance teenagers normally bring to the weight room.
But here’s what made it training rather than a circus act: it was programmed. Specific sets, specific effort levels, tied to the conditioning block we were running. The athletes were developing power, explosive hip extension, grip strength, cardiovascular endurance. They were getting the work done. They just happened to be having the time of their lives doing it.
That’s the distinction that matters. Creative doesn’t mean undisciplined. It means you’ve found a way to deliver a real training stimulus through a vehicle that actually engages the athlete in front of you. With high school kids, that vehicle has to look different from what they expect.
Show Them the Data
One of the most consistently effective things I’ve done with high school programs is make progress visible — posted on the wall where every athlete can see it. Their vertical jump from the first week of the program next to where it is now. Their squat max from August next to where it is in November.
High school athletes, more than any other population I’ve worked with, need to see that what they’re doing is working. They don’t have the long-term perspective that comes with age and experience. They can’t feel the compounding of months of work the way a 25-year-old athlete can. But they can see a number that went up. They can see their name on a board next to a number that’s higher than it was six weeks ago.
I’ve watched kids who were barely engaged in September become completely bought-in by December, simply because they could see themselves improving in measurable ways. The training hadn’t changed that much. The visibility of the progress had. Data is a coaching tool. Use it like one.
Competition Does What Lectures Can’t
Teenagers are competitive by nature. Channeling that correctly is one of the most powerful tools a high school strength coach has. The mistake is making competition about who’s strongest — that immediately creates a hierarchy where the athletes at the top stay engaged and everyone else checks out.
The competition that works is improvement-based. Who improved their vertical the most this month. Which position group improved their average squat the most since August. Which athlete hit a personal record today. When you frame competition around growth rather than absolute performance, every kid in the room has a chance to win — and that means every kid has a reason to stay engaged.
The Hummer worked for the same reason. It wasn’t about being the strongest kid on the team. It was about whether this group of kids, together, could do something they’d never done. They did it, and every one of them owned that.
The Bottom Line on High School Coaching
The physical training principles aren’t that different at the high school level. Progressive overload, sound movement patterns, appropriate periodization — that’s the foundation regardless of age. What’s different is the psychological environment you have to create to make that training happen at full effort, consistently, over a whole season.
You have to be creative. You have to keep their attention. You have to find ways to make the hard work feel like something they want to do, not something they’re enduring. And you have to keep showing them evidence — real, visible, undeniable evidence — that it’s working. The same principles apply to how you manage their recovery: if they can see that resting and recovering makes them faster and stronger, they’ll buy into that too.
If you can do all that, the training takes care of itself. The kids show up. They give you everything they have. And eventually they surprise themselves — the way those Farragut kids surprised themselves when they got that Hummer moving up the hill and realized they weren’t going to stop until it reached the top.
About the Author
Trace Pate is a strength and conditioning coach with over 30 years of experience at the high school, collegiate, and professional levels. He is a Level 4 FST practitioner — the highest certification in the Fascial Stretch Therapy system — and the founder of StrengthandConditioning.com.