One of my assistant coaches texted me a photo from the mall last week. Shorts laying flat on a store shelf, then two question marks. Are these the good kind or the bad kind,” he asked. I zoomed in. The inseam looked like it was brushing my knee. No contest.
I wrote back bad kind.” And I didn’t even hesitate. He bought them anyway. He wore them to practice the next time we got together. By the third sprint set, he was pulling them up between reps because they kept sliding down like he was trying to keep a towel from falling off a towel rack. That right there. That’s the whole problem summed up into one drill.
I’ve been mad about this for years now, honestly longer than I’ve been coaching. But even before then, shorts that ended somewhere near your kneecap have been the standard offerings at most stores for so long now that most guys don’t even notice it as an option until someone points it out. You walk in, you find what fits your waist, and whatever inseam is there just happens to you. Retailers don’t care if you wanted four more inches of fabric hanging off your ankle.
How the heck shorts got this long in the first place
If we rewind through basketball shorts history, that pretty much chases us back to basketball. Listen to me sounding smarter than I actually am. But basketball, once you point it out, isn’t something a lot of us think about while standing in the boys’ department at Target. Through the eighties, dudes’ shorts were short, really short. Shorter than what we think of as ridiculous now would get made fun of if someone wore them to practice. Then some guys started rocking shorts that went way past that accepted norm, went way out past the waistband through the thigh, ending somewhere near the knee. A certain college basketball team wore them a lot in the early nineties. Michael Jordan wore them too, not all the way down to his ankles by today’s standards but longer than most dudes had seen before. And once those shorts became mainstream, anything less was suddenly TOO SHORT for any reasonable kid buying new shorts.
That stayed popular pretty much ever since. And it kept creeping longer every couple of years. Hip hop style during the nineties and 2000s leaned into long and baggy, then came cargo shorts as menswear went mainstream, suddenly nine inch inseams and eleven inch inseams were standard rather than athletes-only extremes. For about 20 years now, retailers sized their shorts that way, built their whole bottom shelves around that inseam staying near the knee, and that was that.
The shorter style we’ve started seeing make a comeback in the last few years, especially the five inch inseams and seven inch inseams, popped up through high fashion first, not athletics. Styles we see on runways and covering menswear for blogs showed up in retail years later, and most brands were (and still kind of are) shy about that shorter style because guess what? Twelve inch inseams look great on a model hanging in a store, and you’re not popping out of that hanger to run suicides in them.
Why you still see so many of them everywhere and why they’re terrible for most guys
Alright, let’s cut to the chase, the part where people are Googling this question and hoping to find an answer. Why do they keep making them so long? If you only take one thing from this article let it be this: when it comes to shorts, most brands treat shorts length like an afterthought. The default setting for a brand that sells size small, medium, and large is they’ll try to sell you that waist with whatever inseam is paired with it in stock. We’re so stuck on how the shorts fit around our waist that we never question if they actually fit around our legs.
The big brains in clothing manufacturing also like having more shorts length because it makes fitting easier. If a guys shorts are a little loose around the thigh, that can look bad at the shortest lengths but looks “less wrong” when there’s sixteen inches of fabric hanging below your knees. Short shorts have to be more exact with their fitting or they just look like loose leggings.
I threw on a pair with one of those super long inseams and ran them through a full workout to see if my problem was just me being anti cool. Full lift, then run through a conditioning circuit for a finisher. Sprints and box jumps were included. By the time we got to box jumps, I was catching the excess material on my knees with every jump landing.
And when I squatted down, all that extra fabric bunched up behind my knees and didn’t fall naturally. Again, that’s where you don’t want extra fabric falling when you’re training at full speed.
The shorter versions actually account for your legs moving. In that 5 to 7 inch range, the shorts aren’t riding down your leg, they’re moving with your leg. Knee doesn’t get pinned when you bend it, nothing bunches up behind you, and there’s no catching your fabric on whatever you jump over when you’re doing drills. If you’re sweating, training, or god forbid working outside in actual summer heat, that matters.
The best advice I can give you about buying the right short is pay attention to that inseam number on the tag before you bother looking at waist size. Inseams tell you way more about how your shorts will actually fit you than anything else on that tag. Shorter ones will move with you. Anything 9+ is living off inches their grandparents used to defend fifty years ago.
Connor coaches rugby in Bristol and has never quite stopped training. He writes about kit that copes with a proper session and still looks fine on a Saturday, and he won’t recommend anything he hasn’t sweated in first.
