At the beginning of the summer before he entered ninth grade, Ryder Frost made a decision that changed his future. A sports-obsessed child growing up in Beverly, Mass., Frost had played everything, from baseball to flag football. But now, he wanted to focus on just one.
He chose basketball.
Ryder’s father, Brady, said that his son had mentioned doing this before. But this time, he was more serious than ever. He wanted to commit solely to basketball, initially, because his older brother Brennan was going to be a senior at Beverly High and he wanted to be good enough to play with him as a freshman. But Ryder – who ultimately went on to star at Phillips Exeter before committing to Notre Dame last year – was also fueled by the desire to never look back on his career with regrets. He wanted to pour everything he had into reaching his potential with basketball.
“I said, I’ll help you every step of the way, but this is up to you,” Brady recalled. “You have to do the work and you have to do the things laid in front of you. It’s totally up to you. If you have a dream, go after it.”
For Frost and hundreds of players in New England with realistic Division 1 basketball aspirations, the commitment is year-round. The calendar is unforgiving; a long school season – which typically features 25 games, more depending on the level – transitions immediately to a grassroots season that can exceed 40 games, and can include 5-7 games each weekend. And that’s just the beginning. It’s widely accepted that a personal trainer is needed to reach the next level. Daily workouts — sometimes more than one per day — are demanded. If you want to reach the Div. 1 level, it’s expected that you’re always in the gym, and working around the clock to get better.
It’s intense, grueling and at times, draining.
“It is crazy,” Brady Frost said. “It’s nuts, and it’s nonstop.”
Added Lawrence Academy coach Mike Foustoukos, “It’s a grind of a year. It really is. You have to really know you want it.”
The question lingers: Is it too much? The answer is probably yes, but for those who want to play college basketball, there’s little choice.
In the age of specialization, when the landscape favors one-sport athletes, in the era of the NCAA transfer portal, when there are fewer Division 1 opportunities, and in the sudden boom of NIL, when the stakes can be hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s the lifestyle they must commit to. Or risk falling behind and missing out on their dream.
“I think it’s a little bit of a reality check, like hey, this is what it takes,” said Chris Giordano, a longtime trainer who owns Gold Standard Basketball Training and has worked with athletes from the NBA level to the youth and who also coaches AAU with the Middlesex Magic. “You gotta work really, really hard to do it, and you have to be super talented, but your work ethic has to be unlike anyone else if you want to get to that level.”
There are, of course, benefits to this lifestyle. Year-round training and competition can make athletes better, and the rewards of this journey can be life-changing. But there are also risks that shouldn’t be ignored.
The No. 1 concern? Injuries.
The elder Frost said that was a constant worry, especially during the AAU season. Multiple games per day, sometimes seven in a weekend, can make these young athletes vulnerable to injury. The Frosts’ experience with the Magic program, he emphasized, was positive – as Ryder experienced a life-changing 2024 spring breakout – but he knows the overall system isn’t necessarily designed with athletes’ best interest in mind. His No. 1 priority was making sure his son was healthy. He was fortunate that Ryder didn’t suffer any serious injuries, but they saw plenty who couldn’t catch breaks.
“There’s not a doctor out there who says that playing seven games in two-and-a-half days is smart,” Frost said. “It’s not. They say do just the opposite. But here these kids are, this is their dream and that’s what they’re doing. …
“It really takes involved parents and involved kids in their own sort of dream, having them take the reins and understand the variables. Yes, this is attainable, but it’s going to take this, and there is a cost to that. It’s a tough thing for (teenage) kids to wrap their heads around.”
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In 2019, ESPN published a report that detailed the injury concerns facing the NBA, which it found were rooted in youth basketball. It touted a 2016 study from David Bell, a professor in Wisconsin’s Department of Kinesiology's Athletic Training Program, which revealed that specialized high school athletes – who train in one sport for more than eight months a year – are two to three times more likely to suffer a hip or knee injury.
A separate study led by Dr. Neeru Jayanthi, the director of sports medicine research and education at Emory, concluded that highly specialized athletes were at a 125 percent higher risk of overuse injuries, like bone and cartilage injuries and ligament injuries.
“Kids are broken by the time they get to college,” Jayanthi said in the ESPN report.
In basketball, athletes are stronger, faster and more athletic than ever, and the game’s quick. Sudden movements put stress on the body. Combine that with the changing landscape, where the rise of club basketball has resulted in more games, more repetitions, more opportunities for younger and younger kids in the chase for more exposure, and wear-and-tear issues are bound to arise.
In 2016, USA Basketball released its first-ever guidelines for youth basketball. It recommended delaying specialization until at least age 14, rest at least one day per week, extended time away every year and education for coaches and families about sport readiness and injury prevention. But, as the ESPN story highlighted, youth basketball still lacks a governing body to enforce these guidelines.
“Because the youth landscape has been so fragmented, you have other actors coming in and gobbling up the space that exists,” David Krichavsky, the NBA's vice president of youth basketball development, said to ESPN. “A lot of them are profit-driven, and you end up with an ecosystem that has kids playing way too much basketball way too early.”
Doing the right things
So, how do kids navigate this world? It starts with a healthy balance, surrounding themselves with the right programs and coaches and getting into a body management routine.
Foustoukos said injury prevention is a constant conversation at Lawrence.
“If you’re going to do it, you have to live in the weight room,” he said.
That doesn’t mean only adding muscle, either. It means going in and strengthening all parts of one’s body, and focusing on recovery, pre-hab and rehab daily. There’s even more that goes into it. Frost mentioned hip mobility exercises that Ryder did, and Giordano emphasized the importance of nutrition, sleep, stretching and even cool-down exercises.
“You have to take care of your body if you want to reach peak performance,” Giordano said. “If you don’t, you’re going to suffer severe consequences. It’s just important to know what to do. The resources today are crazy.”
Added Frost: “If your dream is to play Div. 1 basketball or be as good as you can be, then become obsessed with the things that will enable that to happen. … A lot of those things are boring.”
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One of those things is nutrition, a topic that many say can go overlooked. But for young basketball players who face year-round competition and training, a proper diet is critical for injury prevention, recovery and building still-growing bodies.
Giordano stresses the importance of it. When he and the Middlesex Magic are on the road during AAU tournaments, fried foods and soda are prohibited. When he first started Gold Standard, Giordano connected with Tim DiLeo, now the assistant director of athletics for sports nutrition at UConn, to help educate kids and their families about nutrition. He asked him to make graphics on proper habits, like what you should or shouldn’t eat at AAU tournaments, or what’s a good pregame drink. Still to this day, DiLeo hops on video calls for Giordano’s various programs for education seminars.
At Lawrence, the school’s dining services map out nutritional guidelines. But it can still be easy for kids to fall into bad habits.
“I don’t think it’s stressed enough,” Foustoukos said. “We have strength and conditioning coaches, I think the next thing is getting nutritionists who can help teams and make sure they’re designing plans with kids so they’re not just DoorDash-ing Wendy’s every single night.”
‘Listen to your body’
As grueling as the year-long basketball schedule can be, and as important as it is for athletes to commit to a strong work ethic in pursuit of their dream, Giordano offered a refreshing perspective. Taking some time off isn’t a bad thing.
“You have to strike that balance,” Giordano said. “It’s OK to be like, ‘Hey, I’ve worked every day doing all of it and it’s like, hey, I need a day or two because I’m just tired.’ You have to listen to your body, you have to take care of yourself.”
Ryan Altman, who starred at Rivers and with the Middlesex Magic and is now heading to Penn to start his college basketball career, took it even further. After his AAU circuits completed following his sophomore and junior years, he took the month of August completely off from basketball. His mom, Susan, admired how mindful he was of managing his body, even during exhausting AAU weekends.
“(He said), ‘I’m just taking my time. I’m going to relax,’” she said. “Because he knows, the second September hits, he’s back. … Is that hard? Of course. Because on social media, you’re seeing these kids do all these workouts and things, but he just stayed in his lane, and he always has. …
“I think Ryan is particularly good at balancing. He has a really, really grounded sense of what you have to do to be the best version of you as a person and the athlete part just comes. … I think some people just have that. I don’t think you can play at a higher level if you don’t have that perspective and balance.”
As Frost said, it takes involved families, and it takes the right coaches and programs to arm athletes with resources and guidance to navigate this world. Frost said it was important to find an AAU program like the Magic that prioritized relationships with players and could have a healthy dialogue about managing their body and workload.
Frost, who played college baseball at Vermont and briefly pitched in the Montreal Expos system, said there has never been more information, research and data to inform athletes, but there is just as much misinformation. That’s why involved families and being surrounded by the right coaches and trainers are crucial.
“It’s just as easy to get bad information, it’s just as easy to get influenced by social media or the wrong type of information out there, and you find yourself on a bad path,” he said. “It really does take a whole family effort. (The) kid needs to be bought in, the parents need to be educated on the sport and coaches and training.”
For prep schools, it can be just as complicated. In some cases, usually in the second half of the winter, some teams are playing four games in a week for a month straight, and that puts intense physical demands on them. And the pressure of attaining a college scholarship can be overwhelming. One coach described an experience in which a player was playing through injury as colleges kept asking for film, but the tape wasn’t good because he wasn’t fully healthy.
Not only is strength training and injury prevention important during the grueling winter, but coaches feel a responsibility for better roster construction and minutes allocation, balancing the pursuit to win games while trying to put their players in the best position to perform and keep them fresh for the ensuing grassroots season, which is arguably the most important period of the recruiting calendar.
“We’re literally running these kids into the ground,” one coach said. “If you came to a practice in the first week of the season and last week of the season, you’d be like, this is not the same team.”
There are no easy answers on how to manage it all, and sometimes, kids just have to go through certain experiences to learn. Giordano emphasized that kids with the best work ethic and discipline in both their basketball training and body management are the ones that will thrive, but that doesn’t guarantee anything. Major sacrifices have to be made in this journey, and there are plenty of risks.
“It’s not for everybody, and it shouldn’t be for everybody,” Frost said. “You’re giving up a lot and it takes a lot. It’s not necessarily the right choice for most kids, which is absolutely OK.”
This never-ending calendar will likely never scale back; the market dictates the landscape and follows the money, and it’s profitable, attracting athletes to events and showcases year-round. Personal training methods have become the norm, and players can rarely get away with skipping any of these steps to get a scholarship.
“That’s the price to pay, that’s your entry ticket,” Foustoukos said. “I don’t know if it will change, but I think the way people will approach it will change, I hope for the better.”
