It's 5:45 AM on a Saturday. Your kid has three games today, two tomorrow, and a 90-minute drive before the first whistle. They slept weird in the hotel. They're already tired. And the weekend hasn't even started yet.
Travel season is its own beast. The games are exciting, sure. But the in-between hours, the hotel rooms, the long drives, the fast food, the waiting around in parking lots, that's where the weekend actually happens. And most families go in with a plan for the games but no plan for everything else.
The kids who stay sharp by game three on Sunday aren't the most talented ones. They're the ones whose families figured out how to protect their energy between the whistles.
Sleep Is the Whole Strategy
Nothing else on this list matters if your kid doesn't sleep. And sleeping well at a tournament is harder than it sounds.
Hotel rooms are loud. Teammates are in the hallway. Someone's dad is watching SportsCenter at full volume through the wall. Your kid is wired from the day and scrolling their phone in bed at 11 PM even though they have an 8 AM game.
Start with the environment. A sleep mask blocks out the hallway light and the parking lot glow that hotel curtains never fully handle. It also becomes a signal. Mask goes on, the day is done. Pair it with a white noise app on your phone or theirs and the hotel room gets a lot closer to sleepable.
For the drive, a travel neck pillow turns the backseat into a recovery zone. The kids who can actually nap between games have a serious advantage over the ones who spend that time staring at their phone. Even 20 minutes of real rest changes how they show up for the next game.
Set a phone curfew the night before. It doesn't have to be dramatic. Just "phones charge on the counter at 10" and hold the line. The group chat will survive without them for eight hours.
Recovery Isn't Just for Pros
Your kid played two games on turf in 85-degree heat and now they're sitting in a hotel room eating Cheez-Its. Their legs are going to feel like concrete by tomorrow morning if nobody intervenes.
A mini foam roller or a massage ball takes up almost no space in a bag and gives your kid something to use on their calves, quads, and feet between games. They don't need a full physical therapy routine. Five minutes of rolling out while they're watching TV in the hotel room is enough to keep their legs from completely locking up overnight.
Stretching matters too, but most kids won't do a full stretching routine unprompted. Make it casual. Roll the ball under their feet while they're sitting on the bed. Use the foam roller during a movie. If it feels like part of hanging out instead of a chore, they'll actually do it.
And hydration doesn't stop when the game ends. Keep water accessible in the hotel room. A lot of tournament soreness is really just dehydration that compounded across a full day of games.
Protect Their Mental Battery
Physical fatigue is obvious. Mental fatigue is sneakier and just as destructive.
By the third game of a tournament, most kids aren't physically gassed. They're mentally checked out. The focus is gone. The intensity drops. They're going through the motions because their brain ran out of gas two hours ago.
The fix is giving their brain real downtime between games. Not more game film. Not more "let's talk about what you need to do differently." Actual mental rest.
A good pair of noise-cancelling headphones is one of the best investments you can make for tournament weekends. They let your kid disappear into music, a podcast, or just silence during the drive or the wait between games. That sensory break matters more than most parents realize. A kid who zones out to their playlist for 30 minutes comes back more focused than one who spent that time dissecting the last game with teammates.
Bring a card game or something completely unrelated to sports. Let them be a kid between being an athlete. The mental separation is what keeps them engaged when it counts.
The Hotel Room Reset
Most families treat the hotel room as a place to crash. The families who do tournament weekends well treat it as a recovery station.
Lay out clothes for the next day the night before so the morning isn't chaos. Pack a power strip because hotel rooms never have enough outlets and four devices need charging by 9 PM. Keep a plastic bag in the room for dirty uniforms and wet socks so the clean gear stays clean.
Bring their own pillow from home if you've got the car space. Hotel pillows are universally terrible and a kid who sleeps on something familiar sleeps better. It sounds small. It adds up across a two or three-day weekend.
And plan at least one meal that isn't gas station food. Even if it's a sandwich from the cooler you packed, real food between games gives their body something to actually work with. Tournament nutrition doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be intentional once or twice across the weekend.
The Mindset That Holds It All Together
Here's the thing most families learn too late about tournament weekends: your kid takes their emotional cues from you.
If you're stressed about the schedule, frantic in the morning, tense between games, and dissecting every play at dinner, they absorb all of it. The weekend starts to feel like a pressure cooker instead of an experience.
But if you're calm, if the car ride has good music, if the hotel room is a chill zone, if the conversation between games is about the funny thing that happened at breakfast instead of the goal they missed, the whole weekend changes.
Your kid will remember the tournaments. The freezing early mornings, the team dinners, the hotel pool at 9 PM, the inside jokes from the backseat. Make sure those memories aren't buried under exhaustion and stress they could've avoided with a little planning.
The families who enjoy travel season aren't the ones with the most talented kids. They're the ones who figured out that what happens between the games is what makes or breaks the weekend.
Ian Goldberg is the CEO of Signature Media and the Editor of the largest and fastest growing sports parenting newsletter. He's been recognized as an industry expert by the National Alliance for Youth Sports, the US Olympic Committee's Truesport, and the Aspen Institute's Project Play. Ian is also a suburban NJ sports dad of two teenage daughters and has over 2,000 hours of volunteer time coaching them (which he calls the most fun form of R&D for his newsletter content). Ian and his team provide players, coaches, parents and program directors with the articles and content they need to have a great sports season. Ian has spent most of his career in digital product development and marketing and got his start at the White House where he worked for the economic advisors to two US Presidents.
