Personal · Parents & Youth Sport

The Letters After Their Name Aren't the Whole Answer: How to Actually Vet a Youth Strength Coach

By Muhammad Dzulhisham · MSc Sports Coaching, NSCA-CSCS

Almost every parent who calls me about a youth strength and conditioning programme asks some version of the same first question: "What should I be looking for?" It's a fair question, and an underserved one — there's plenty written about what a good adult training programme looks like, and almost nothing practical about how a parent, PE head, or club director with no exercise science background is supposed to tell a genuinely qualified youth coach from someone who's simply put "strength coach" on a business card.

[ASK COACH DZUL: a specific, real conversation or moment with a parent or school that prompted writing this article — e.g. a particular question asked most often, or a vetting conversation that stood out]

The honest answer is that credentials matter, but not in the way most people assume, and they're nowhere near the whole picture. A framed certificate tells you someone passed an exam. It doesn't tell you whether they know how to read a growth spurt, whether they'll actually individualise a session for your child instead of scaling down an adult's programme by percentage, or whether they'll tell you the truth when something isn't working. Here's how I'd actually break down the vetting process — grounded in what the credentialing bodies themselves require, and what the National Strength and Conditioning Association's own published guidance says a "qualified professional" is supposed to look like.

Not all certifications are the same exam

This is the part that surprises most parents: the fitness industry doesn't have one bar for "certified." It has several, and they sit at genuinely different heights.

At the entry-level end, a general personal training certification — NASM-CPT, ACE-CPT, or the ACSM Certified Personal Trainer credential — requires a high school diploma or GED, current CPR/AED certification, and passing a written exam. No prior fitness education, no exercise science coursework, and no degree of any kind is required to sit for any of them.¹ That's not a criticism of personal trainers as a profession — plenty are excellent at what they're actually trained for, which is coaching generally healthy adults through safe, well-supervised general fitness programming. It's simply a fact about the floor: the letters "CPT" after someone's name confirm they passed a written exam after a self-study course, nothing more, and nothing about paediatric exercise science specifically.

The NSCA's Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) credential sits on different ground. As of 2026, a candidate must hold at least a bachelor's degree — in any field of study, for now — or be enrolled as a college senior, plus current CPR/AED certification, before they're even eligible to sit the exam.² The exam itself is a four-hour, 220-question test split into two separately scored sections, Scientific Foundations and Practical/Applied, with a required passing score of 70 out of 100 on each.² From 1 January 2030, the NSCA is raising that bar further: U.S. candidates will need a bachelor's degree specifically from a program accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Strength and Conditioning Education (CASCE), not simply a degree in any subject.³ The American College of Sports Medicine draws a comparable line inside its own certification family — the entry-level ACSM Certified Personal Trainer needs only a high school diploma, while the ACSM Certified Exercise Physiologist credential requires a bachelor's degree specifically in exercise science or a closely related field.⁴

None of this means a CPT can't be a fine coach for general fitness, or that a CSCS is automatically the right fit for your child. It means the two credentials are answering different questions, and it's worth knowing which question the person in front of you actually passed an exam on.

The credential is a floor, not the whole answer

Here's the part I'd want every parent to sit with for a second, because it cuts against the instinct to stop at "do they have a certification." The NSCA's own position statement on long-term athletic development — the document that lays out ten pillars for how youth training should actually be structured — defines what it calls a "qualified professional" in three parts, not one.⁵

"A qualified professional possesses (a) an appropriate understanding of pediatric exercise science, exercise prescription, technique evaluation, and testing methods, (b) relevant coaching experience and a strong pedagogical background, and (c) a recognized strength and conditioning qualification, for example, the Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) certification." — NSCA Position Statement on Long-Term Athletic Development

Read that carefully and the credential is only one of three legs. A CSCS confirms part (c). It says nothing, on its own, about parts (a) and (b) — whether this specific person actually understands how a growing skeleton responds to load differently than an adult's, and whether they've built the coaching experience and pedagogical instinct to apply that understanding to an actual eleven-year-old in front of them rather than to a textbook case. A coach can hold a genuinely rigorous credential and still run a program built entirely around adult logic. The credential tells you they cleared a real academic and testing bar. It doesn't tell you what they've done with it since.

[ASK COACH DZUL: a specific example he's encountered of the gap between a credential and actual youth-specific competence — e.g. a coach with strong general qualifications who still ran an inappropriate program for young athletes, described generally without naming anyone]

What to actually ask about programming philosophy

Once the credential check is done, the more revealing conversation is about how someone actually builds a program. These are the questions I'd bring to a first conversation with any coach working with your child, and the position statement above gives a fairly direct steer on what a good answer sounds like for each one.

• "How do you decide where my child starts?" The position statement's first pillar states that long-term athletic development pathways "should accommodate for the highly individualized and non-linear nature of the growth and development of youth."⁵ A coach who answers with "everyone in this age group starts on the same six-week block" is describing a group class, not an individualised program — whatever the group is called.
• "How does the plan change as the season goes on?" Pillar nine is explicit that practitioners working with youth "should systematically progress and individualize training programs for successful long-term athletic development."⁵ Ask for a concrete example of how a specific athlete's plan has actually changed over a season, not a general description of periodization theory.
• "What do you actually track, and how often?" Pillar eight calls for practitioners to "use relevant monitoring and assessment tools as part of a long-term athletic development strategy."⁵ That could be something as simple as logged training loads, movement-quality checks, or regular height measurements — the specific tool matters less than whether one exists and gets used.
• "What happens when a kid hits a growth spurt mid-season?" A coach who has never thought about this hasn't engaged with one of the central ideas in the position statement — that two athletes of identical chronological age can be years apart in biological maturity, and a program built around birth year rather than developmental stage is measuring the wrong thing.
• "What's your intake process for injury history?" A real intake — previous injuries, current pain, growth history, other sports being played concurrently — should exist before a first session, not get discovered by accident three weeks in.
• "How will I hear about what's actually happening in sessions?" Not a marketing update — a real account of what's being trained, why, and how it's adjusting. A coach who can't explain their own programming logic to a parent in plain language likely doesn't have one worth explaining.

Red flags worth taking seriously

A few patterns are worth treating as genuine warning signs rather than personal style preferences.

A program that's just an adult program, scaled down

If every athlete in a given age group is running the identical block regardless of training history, sport, or where they sit relative to their own growth spurt, that's a direct contradiction of the position statement's first and ninth pillars on individualised, non-linear programming.⁵ "Kid-sized" percentages of an adult template is not the same thing as a program actually built around a developing athlete.

Maximal-effort testing with no clear rationale

This one deserves a more careful answer than a flat "never test kids at maximum effort," because the research doesn't actually say that. The NSCA's position statement on youth resistance training reviewed the available evidence and found that supervised, technically sound maximal-strength testing — 1RM lifts, maximal isometric or isokinetic tests — has not been shown to injure properly prepared young athletes in prospective research.⁶ The same statement is candid, though, that the philosophical justification for doing it at all is thin: "most of the forces that children are exposed to in sports and recreational activities are likely to be greater in both duration and magnitude of exposure than competently supervised and properly performed maximal strength tests."⁶ In other words, the real red flag isn't a coach who ever tests a heavy lift — it's a coach who does it without a clear training reason, without first confirming technique on lighter loads, without close individual supervision, or as a public leaderboard exercise rather than a private assessment tool. Ask why the test is happening and what it's actually informing. If there's no clear answer, that's the problem — not the barbell.

No individualisation by training age or maturity, only by grade or birth year

A program organised strictly by school grade or birth year, with no acknowledgment that kids in the same class can be years apart in biological development, misses exactly the variability the position statement's operational definitions are built around.⁵

Nothing being tracked or reassessed

If a program has been running for months with no record of what's changed — no notes, no reassessment, no way to point to progress beyond "they seem stronger" — there's no monitoring system behind pillar eight's recommendation, which means there's also no real basis for adjusting the plan.⁵

A coach who can't or won't explain their reasoning to you

A qualified coach should be able to tell you, in plain language, why a session is built the way it is. "Trust the process" without a follow-up explanation is not the same thing as expertise — it's frequently the absence of it, dressed up in confidence.

[ASK COACH DZUL: a specific red flag or pattern he's actually observed in another program's approach to young athletes, described generally without identifying the coach or organisation]

What I'd actually want a parent to walk away with

None of this is meant to turn a first conversation with a coach into an interrogation, and it isn't meant to suggest that a CSCS is the only acceptable letters after someone's name — plenty of excellent youth coaches build their competence through a mix of relevant qualifications, mentorship, and years of hands-on experience with young athletes specifically. What I'd actually want a parent or school to walk away with is a shift in what "qualified" means in the first place: not a single credential to check for, but three questions to hold at once — does this person have a real, verifiable qualification; do they have actual experience and pedagogical grounding in coaching young athletes specifically; and can they explain, in terms that make sense to you, why your child's program looks the way it does.

That's the same standard the field's own governing body holds itself to on paper. It's a reasonable one to hold up in person, too.