Fast Risers, Slow Bakers, and the Program Design Question Most Directors Never Ask

The Premise

I spend a lot of time talking with leaders of sports organizations. One conversation keeps coming back to me. It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about what happens to athletes after the early promise fades.

In 2004, Freddy Adu signed a professional soccer contract at 14 years old. He appeared on magazine covers across the country. Comparisons to Pelé weren’t considered hyperbole. He was everything a youth sports system is built to celebrate: exceptional early, undeniable, every checkpoint confirming what everyone around him already believed. By his mid-twenties, his professional career had quietly faded. He moved through clubs across multiple countries, never finding consistent footing at the highest level.

Whether or not the youth sports system caused Adu’s trajectory isn’t the point. His story illustrates something worth thinking about: youth sports has become very good at recognizing early success while spending far less time preparing athletes for the inevitable plateaus, setbacks, and changing competitive landscape that follow. Most programs are designed to identify talent. Fewer are designed to develop it over time.

That is the extraction model. It takes value from an athlete’s early development window without investing equally in what they will need when that window closes. Most club programs run it without knowing they do.

That’s the kind of lens The LnUP Letters tries to bring: taking what research has already figured out about human development and asking what it means for the people designing club programs.

Fast Risers and Slow Bakers

Research compiled by David Epstein suggests that athletic development is far less linear than most youth sports systems assume. Early performance can be a useful signal, but it is far from a reliable predictor of long-term excellence. He describes what coaches and development experts call fast risers and slow bakers.

Fast risers develop early and visibly. They jump to the front at tryouts, earn the elite placements, and attract the most coaching attention. Slow bakers develop more gradually, often outside the visibility of formal systems built to identify talent. They look unremarkable to most coaches at early checkpoints. And then, very suddenly, they don’t.

A finding that should challenge how directors think about their programs: most repeat champions at the highest levels were slow bakers, not fast risers. Early promise is a noisy signal. It tells you who developed fastest in a particular window. It does not reliably tell you who will ultimately be best.

Most of us have seen fast risers in our communities who didn’t sustain that early advantage as competition deepened. The slow baker story is harder to see locally because slow bakers often leave the system before they develop. But the pattern shows up everywhere at the highest levels.

Carli Lloyd was cut from US youth national teams and nearly quit soccer entirely. She scored a hat trick in the first 16 minutes of a World Cup final at age 32. Aaron Rodgers didn’t receive a meaningful D1 scholarship offer out of high school and enrolled at Butte College, a junior college in California, before transferring to Cal Berkeley. He sat in the green room at the 2005 NFL draft while 23 teams passed on him, then won multiple MVPs and a Super Bowl. Larry Nelson didn’t pick up a golf club until he was 21, teaching himself from a Ben Hogan instructional book after returning from Vietnam. He won three major championships. Scottie Pippen received little recruiting attention out of high school and enrolled at the University of Central Arkansas as an equipment manager before earning a roster spot. He became a six-time NBA champion and one of the greatest defenders the game has ever seen. Tim Duncan spent his early athletic years focused on competitive swimming until Hurricane Hugo destroyed the only Olympic-sized pool on his island. He turned to basketball almost by accident and became arguably the greatest power forward in NBA history.

Different sports. Different paths. One question worth sitting with: how many athletes in your program right now are slow bakers who are reading the signals your program sends correctly, concluding the system doesn’t believe in them, and quietly deciding to leave?

The Two Problems Most Programs Create

The extraction model harms fast risers just as much as it sidelines slow bakers. It just does it differently and on a different timeline.

When a program is built primarily to identify and celebrate early excellence, it builds a fast riser’s identity around being the best. That identity rests on a foundation biology is providing, not character. When slow bakers develop and the competitive gap narrows, which Epstein’s research says is the more common developmental arc, the fast riser faces something the program never prepared them for. The athletes who build long and meaningful relationships with their sport are the ones who developed an identity built on their love of learning and the work itself. Not on where they ranked at 13.

Programs that use fast risers’ early talent to build the club’s competitive results and reputation, without investing equally in preparing those athletes for the developmental plateaus ahead, are not intentionally failing them. Yet these athletes are often left without the developmental foundation of resilience, love of learning, and the growth mindset needed to compete at levels where talent is more evenly matched.

Slow bakers face a different version of the same problem. If the signals your program sends tell a 13-year-old who isn’t yet excelling that the system doesn’t have a place for them, they leave. Not because they couldn’t develop. Because they concluded, reasonably, that your program wasn’t designed for their arc.

Both outcomes represent a failure of program design, not of athlete potential.

What Norway Can Teach Us

Norway is a country of five million people, smaller than metropolitan Atlanta, and one of the most consistently successful sporting nations in the world. There are many reasons for that success, including coaching education, community clubs, and broad participation infrastructure. One philosophy, however, stands out.

Young athletes are encouraged to sample sports, enjoy competition, and continue participating without heavy adult-driven ranking and selection during childhood. No official rankings or scorekeeping before age 13. The focus is on joy, broad sampling, and mass participation. Adults are not permitted to deselect athletes early, which means more slow bakers have the chance to stay in the system long enough to develop.

Norway doesn’t treat broad participation and elite performance as competing priorities. It treats broad participation as the foundation from which elite performance eventually emerges. That is an important distinction for any director who believes that identifying and investing only in fast risers is the path to building a competitive program.

Designing for Both

The program design question most directors never ask is this: is your program built to develop athletes or to extract from them?

Designing for slow bakers means creating multiple pathways and entry points rather than one elite track. It means development investment that doesn’t require current top performance to access. It means educating coaches to recognize growth and potential rather than just current performance. And it means creating enough positive experience that slow bakers stay in your program long enough to find out what they could become.

Designing for fast risers without the extraction model means building process identity rather than performance identity. Praise effort and learning, not current ranking. Prepare athletes explicitly for the developmental plateau rather than letting it arrive as a crisis. Design challenges that test fast risers beyond their current physical advantage so that when the advantage narrows, they have skills and character to stand on.

For both groups the common thread is the same. Separate current performance from projected potential in how your program communicates value to athletes and families. Build team cultures where different developmental trajectories are normalized rather than treated as evidence of ceiling. Design learning goals alongside competitive goals every season. Be honest with families about what development actually looks like over time.

Director’s Reflection

Before planning next season, consider three questions.

How many athletes who weren’t on your top team at age 12 are now contributing on your oldest teams? How many athletes leave your program before high school, and what reasons do they give? If an athlete develops later than expected, does your program provide a realistic pathway for them to continue growing?

Those answers reveal more about your development system than your trophy case ever will.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Freddy Adu’s career isn’t proof that early success is a mistake. It’s a reminder that identifying talent and developing talent are not the same thing. One recognizes what an athlete is today. The other prepares them for who they might become tomorrow.

What does your program tell a 12-year-old slow baker about whether there’s still a place for them? And what does it tell a 14-year-old fast riser about who they are when their early advantage begins to narrow?

Every club has fast risers. Every club has slow bakers. The question isn’t whether they’re in your gym today. The question is whether your program is designed so both have the opportunity to become who they’re capable of becoming.

A future issue of The LnUP Letters will explore one of the biggest challenges directors face when adopting this philosophy: helping parents understand why long-term development often looks very different from short-term competitive success.