The session nobody sees

Watch the twenty minutes before a session starts, and the twenty minutes after it ends. That is where you find out what a generation does with its spare time.

Heads down. Phones out. Occasionally a tablet propped against a bag. Nobody is doing anything wrong, and I have no interest in the tired argument about screens ruining childhood. But those forty minutes are real time, repeated several times a week, and they were being spent in a way that left nothing behind.

So we built somewhere else for them to go.

Making things instead of watching things

We turned a space at the academy into a room with no screens in it. There is chess. There is table football. There is a miniature golf course we designed and printed ourselves, because we bought a 3D printer and a laser cutter and put them to work making jigsaws, puzzles and games for the players to use.

The kids build things now. They compete at things. They talk to each other while they do it, which is worth more than any of it.

The distinction I care about is not screens versus no screens. It is consumption versus creation. Both fill the same twenty minutes. Only one of them leaves a young person with something they made, a game they won, or a conversation they had. When you give children a genuinely better option, most of them take it without being told to.

That room was the easy fix. It also pointed at a harder one.

Because if the twenty minutes before a session matter, the hour before bed matters far more, and that is the hour almost nobody is protecting.

What sleep is actually doing

Sleep is not the gap between training days. It is where a good part of the training gets converted into a better athlete.

The clearest piece of the science is hormonal. A large, reproducible burst of growth hormone is released shortly after a young person falls asleep, arriving in step with the first stretch of deep sleep. Researchers are careful about how they phrase the next part, and so will I: the link between deep sleep and that hormone release is a strong, dose-related association rather than settled proof that one causes the other. But the timing is not in dispute, and neither is the practical implication. Growing bodies do their growing at night.

There is a second claim you will hear from coaches, that a night of sleep bakes in the skills practised that day. The honest position is that this is less settled than it sounds. The famous study behind it was done with adults on a finger-tapping task, and when researchers tried something similar with young teenagers learning a full-body skill, the overnight improvement did not show up in the way the popular version promises. Sleep looks more like the thing that protects what was learned than a magic overnight upgrade. That is still a good reason to protect it. It is not a reason to promise a child that sleeping will make them better at stepovers.

What has held up across large reviews is less exciting and more useful. Children who regularly sleep enough show better attention, behaviour, learning, memory and emotional regulation. Children who regularly sleep too little show the opposite, along with higher rates of accidents and injuries. The same sleep serves the player and the pupil. There is no separate athlete version.

The numbers, and how far off we are

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine, whose guidance is endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, sets it out plainly. Children aged six to twelve need nine to twelve hours of sleep in a twenty-four hour period, on a regular basis. Teenagers aged thirteen to eighteen need eight to ten.

Read those numbers again with a school night in mind. A twelve-year-old who is up at half six needs to be genuinely asleep by half nine to reach the bottom of that range. Not in bed. Asleep. For most families that means the wind-down starts around half eight, in the middle of everything else that a weeknight contains.

Almost nobody hits it. That is not a criticism of parents, it is a description of modern evenings.

The injury evidence gives the numbers some teeth. Adolescent athletes who chronically sleep badly carry higher odds of getting injured, and a 2019 review of the available studies put that at roughly one and a half times the odds of their well-slept teammates. I want to be straight about the strength of that finding: the effect is modest and the evidence base is small. It is not a scare statistic. But it points the same way as everything else, and no coach I know would ignore a training variable that moved injury risk in the wrong direction.

Where the usual screen advice gets it wrong

Here is where I part company with the usual advice.

The popular story is about blue light. Buy the glasses, flip the night-mode switch, problem solved. The evidence for that specific mechanism is weaker than you would expect. Trials of blue-light-blocking glasses have not shown a meaningful benefit to sleep, and reviews have not found that blue light systematically wrecks sleep quality or delays sleep onset. Most of that work was done with adults rather than children, so it is not the last word, but it is enough to stop repeating the claim with total confidence.

What holds up is simpler, and it is behavioural rather than optical. Screens keep young people awake because of what is on them, not because of the wavelength coming off them. A game is designed to hold attention. A group chat carries social stakes that raise the heart rate. A video autoplays into the next video. None of that belongs in the last stretch of the day, when the job is to get quieter, not more engaged.

The NHS advice is the sensible version and it fits on one line: no screens for the hour before bed, and no screens in the bedroom overnight.

The second half of that is the one that changes households. A phone charging in the kitchen removes the two o'clock scroll that nobody admits to, and it removes the notification that wakes a child who was doing fine.

Three things worth doing

If you take one thing from this, take the hour.

Protect the last hour. Screens off, lights lower, something analogue in its place. The habit matters more than perfection on any single night.

Get the phone out of the bedroom. Charge it somewhere else, as a house rule that applies to adults too, because children copy what they see far more reliably than they follow what they are told.

Work out the actual bedtime. Take the wake-up time, count back the hours their age band needs, and be honest about the answer. Most families discover the target bedtime is thirty to sixty minutes earlier than the current one. That gap is usually the whole problem.

The same child, the same sleep

We built a screen-free room because the downtime was going to waste. The deeper reason is that the habits formed in those in-between hours are the ones that show up at ten o'clock at night, when a young person decides whether to put the phone down.

A well-slept fourteen-year-old is a better footballer. They are also a better student, a steadier friend, and a more pleasant person to live with, which will matter for far longer than their football will.

That is the argument I keep coming back to. Sport is not a separate compartment of a young person's life with its own rules. Look after the athlete and you are looking after the pupil, because they are the same child, and they only get one night's sleep between them.

Sources: sleep duration recommendations, American Academy of Sleep Medicine consensus statement (Paruthi et al., 2016), endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Injury odds in adolescent athletes, systematic review and meta-analysis (Gao et al., 2019), building on Milewski et al. (2014). Growth hormone and slow-wave sleep, Van Cauter and colleagues. Screen guidance, NHS.