People do not "burn out" doing things they love. Sure, they take a break once in awhile, to recharge. But if they really love the activity, they come back after their mini-hiatus fully energized and excited -- often more than they were before.

So, if a kid loves a sport so much that he’s willing to play it or practice at it year-round, don’t worry about him burning out. As long as he manages the activity and gives himself an occasional timeout when he feels he needs it, he’ll be just fine.

If he ends up quitting the sport altogether, it’s either because his passion waned, his interest changed -- or he never really loved the sport in the first place. All of those reasons are perfectly normal. Kids change as they get older, and so do their interests. If your 17-year-old son stops watching cartoons like he did when he was 5, it’s not because he burned out on them. It’s because his entertainment interests changed as a result of growing older and being exposed to new forms of … ahem … entertainment.

Kids quit competitive sports for the same reasons. They discover the opposite sex. They take on new social or political views. They decide they want more free time to devote to other interests.

But to suggest that a kid permanently lost interest in something he loves doing, simply because he did it too much, is silly.

Why bring all of this up? Well, in case you haven’t noticed, more and more sports are becoming "year-round" at the high school level and even below that. Coaches are expecting kids to work at their fundamentals and conditioning in the off season so that they can avoid having to "relearn" things when their sport is in season.

Competitive, committed athletes rarely object to this. Sure, they get weary of it, occasionally. But they find a way to back off for a few days and decompress. Their parents understand the process and help kids work through it.

But there’s another group of players and parents who don’t get it. Rather than see off-season workouts as an opportunity to improve and to demonstrate their commitment to their coaches and teammates, they protest and claim that kids will "burn out" if they have to put so much work into a sport as such a young age.

(Funny, you rarely hear this complaint about other year-round extracurriculars, such as music or voice lessons, dance, art; not to mention recreational activities such as video games … but I digress.)

Coaches are partly to blame. Often they do a poor job communicating the value of off-season workouts, presenting them as mandatory instead of complementary. Or, they set up multi-sport athletes for failure, by suggesting their "other" sport is hurting their "main" sport.

I’ve dealt with that mistake in my "Dos and Don’t’s for coaches" writeup. But since it’s not likely to go away anytime soon, I believe parents and players need to accept it and deal with it.

How?  First, understand that, if coaches "favor" kids who attend off-season workouts, it’s not personal favoritism. Coaches are naturally going to gravitate first to kids that they’ve been seeing all year and that require less "remedial" work.

I’ve coached many off-season workouts. I remember the kids who were there, and those kids are the first who come to mind when I and my colleagues create our first depth charts for the regular season. It’s not because we dislike the other kids. It’s because we haven’t even seen them all year. For all we know, they’ve gotten slow, fat and out of shape, and aren’t even coming out for the team.

Besides, why shouldn’t we reward the kids who put in the time to get better in the off season? They’ve demonstrated a commitment to excellence. They deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Does that mean your youngster has no shot at earning playing time or a starting job, if he skips off-season workouts for some reason? Well, no, not necessarily.

It does mean he’ll have lots of catching up to do, though. He’ll have to convince the coaches that he’s committed to the sport. And he’ll have to prove he’s better than the kids who attended off-season workouts.

Whether or not he can make up the ground he lost will depend on his natural skill, passion and in-season work ethic. If he’s naturally better than the kids who showed up for off-season drills, he’ll eventually move ahead of them on the depth chart, because the coaches will see that he can help win games. Likewise, if he outworks and outhustles the kids who attended off-season workouts, his improvement curve will be steeper and, again, he’ll eventually pass them.

So instead of invoking the "burnout" clause and indicting coaches for holding workouts in the off season, let's start seeing these sessions for what they really are: opportunities for competitive athletes to accomplish their goal of earning more playing time or even a starting job.

And if a youngster decides not to take advantage of these opportunities, let's start seeing his reluctance for what it really is: an indication that his interests and passions lie somewhere else, rather than in competitive athletics.