When training athletes, I pretty much never look at exercises to “build muscle mass”.
When training athletes I only really worry about performance and injury prevention.
With athletes I train movement patterns, physical capacities and energy systems.
Is there a pressing movement that is more specific to a movement in the sport you are playing? If yes, then it will be a slightly better choice than other options.
And the fact is that you rarely have to push downward in sports. So the dip is not movement-specific to many sports, and thus is rarely going to be the best option for a pressing movement.
You much more often have to press away from you than downward. In that sense, a bench press or slight incline press is more useful to be strong in than dips.
That doesn’t mean that you have to do a barbell bench press.
A pro football player that I train uses the Kadillac bar from Kabuki strength (which has a parallel grip), you can also use DB presses as they tend to be more shoulder-friendly.
Now, if your main goal is hypertrophy, the dip is arguably better than a barbell bench press.
But as I said, hypertrophy is pretty much never one of my main goal with athletes. Rather, it’s a side effect of getting stronger and more powerful.
An athlete came to me and he was 208 at 6’. And at first, he was shocked that we did ZERO hypertrophy work, none of the sets were above 5 reps per set and we basically had no isolation exercises.
In one off-season he went up to 231. Again, that was NOT our goal, we didn’t train to add muscle. But it still happened.
To answer your question, I rarely use dips in the training of athletes as I feel that it is an inferior movement for most of the them.
Recently, I used it with a track/sprint cyclist. Along with a decline bench, it is more specific to his sport position and requirement. But once he got to a 150kg decline bench, we actually stopped training these hard and he had sufficient upper body strength, I preferred to invest resources elsewhere.
That’s the other thing with athletes: do the least amount of lifting work possible. They need to keep their nervous system fresh at all times and also must do other forms of training.