How High School Athletes Actually Wake Up for 5 AM Practice

Two-a-day practices start before dawn primarily to get athletes off the field before the heat of the day sets in, a scheduling choice driven by state athletic association safety rules rather than tradition. Teenage athletes wake up for those sessions the way most people get through any unreasonably early obligation: staged alarms, a backup person who checks on them, gear staged the night before, and increasingly, some kind of external check that confirms they’re actually up and not just planning to be.

At a high school practice field in the Southeast in mid-August, 6 AM air can already sit in the mid-70s with humidity thick enough to fog a helmet visor before a single sprint. That’s the entire reason the practice is happening at that hour instead of at 3 PM: a schedule built around beating the heat, not tradition.

The heat rule behind the wake-up time

The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) publishes heat-acclimatization guidance that most state associations have adopted in some form for football and other high-contact preseason sports. The core idea: give athletes’ bodies one to two weeks to adjust to exercising in heat before allowing full-pad, full-contact, multiple-session days. During that window, equipment is added in stages, single-practice days come before two-practice days, and mandatory rest periods sit between sessions when two-a-days are allowed at all.

Layered on top of that, many state associations — Georgia’s among the more visible examples — require coaches to monitor wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT), a heat-stress measurement that accounts for humidity and radiant heat, not just air temperature, and to modify or cancel practice once readings pass a set safety limit. Morning is simply the cheapest way to stay under that number. It’s the same logic that puts desert road crews and marathon start lines at sunrise: the work has to happen, so it happens before the thermometer makes it dangerous.

A body that isn’t ready for it

The heat logic runs into a biological one. During puberty, the timing of melatonin release shifts later, delaying the point at which a teenager’s body is naturally ready for sleep — a well-documented circadian phase delay, not a discipline problem, as the research on school start times and teenage sleep lays out in more detail. A 5:30 AM wake-up call doesn’t just feel early to a 16-year-old; it can land close to the middle of their body’s expected sleep window.

Stack a two-a-day schedule on top of that delay and the math gets worse before it gets better. A typical preseason day might run an early practice, school or workouts, a second afternoon session, and homework — leaving a shorter evening runway before an already-delayed sleep onset. Run that for the ten to fourteen days a heat-acclimatization period usually covers, and most athletes are accumulating a real sleep debt by the second week, even when nobody involved is doing anything wrong.

What the sleep research actually says

The clearest evidence that this debt matters for performance, not just mood, comes from Cheri D. Mah and colleagues at Stanford, published in the journal Sleep in 2011. Extending nightly sleep among college athletes improved measures like sprint times, reaction speed, and daytime alertness compared to their normal, shorter sleep — a finding that’s since been cited widely in college and pro athletic-department sleep programs, even though it predates the current wave of wearable-tracked “sleep as training” culture. The study didn’t cover high schoolers specifically, and there’s not much dedicated research on preseason sleep debt in that age group — a real gap, since the biology (adolescent phase delay) and the schedule (two-a-days) collide hardest exactly there.

What programs do about it, when they do anything, tends to look similar across sports. A composite of what several assistant coaches describe, built from common patterns rather than any single interview: lights-out times posted alongside practice schedules, a “phone in a drawer” rule for the hour before bed, and an assumption that parents are the actual enforcement mechanism at home, because a coach can’t verify what happens at 9 PM in someone else’s house.

The wake-up itself, mechanically

Almost nobody relies on a single alarm. The common pattern is layered: one alarm across the room instead of on the nightstand, a second backup alarm, and a person — a parent, a carpool teammate, occasionally a group chat — who’s expected to notice if someone doesn’t show. That last piece borrows a logic that shows up in other sports that don’t trust athletes to self-report a hard number, the same way wrestling and other weight-limited sports build in a supervised check instead of taking an athlete’s word for it. A wake-up isn’t a weigh-in, but the underlying bet is the same: a habit gets more reliable once someone else can see whether it happened.

A small number of teams and individual athletes have started plugging that exact gap with an app called DontSnooze, which asks the athlete to send real-time proof they’re up to a small group after the alarm fires. It’s a narrow fix for a narrow moment — the ten seconds after the alarm goes off, before anyone’s decided whether to actually get up — not a substitute for the earlier bedtime nobody’s schedule leaves room for.

None of this closes the underlying gap identified by research on how elite athletes treat sleep as a trainable variable rather than an afterthought — high school programs mostly don’t have a sports-science staff dedicated to it. And it’s worth being honest about what’s unmeasured here: the effect of a missed early alarm on a single practice is small and mostly invisible, in roughly the same way sleep-deprived esports players don’t necessarily lose the match even as their reaction times measurably slow down. The cost of two-a-days sleep debt shows up in accumulation, in week two rather than day one, which is exactly why it’s easy for a program to underestimate.