Friday is a big day for the program. All four teams have opening days of one sort or another. The Varsity and JV will open their regular seasons with road games at Londonderry High School at 4:30.
The bus will depart at 1:45. Needless to say, it is in the best interest of every player to obsessively check every piece of equipment throughout the morning. Every mouthpiece, every sock, every shin pad.
The Freshman team, riding high after a well-played 1-0 victory in their annual derby with the Varsity girls, will host Londonderry at 4:30 at Dresden. Players should arrive at 3:30. Hanover is wearing all white.
It's also opening day for the Reserve team, which will have its first practice at Dresden from 4:00 - 5:30. Every player intending to play Reserve soccer should be there, unless you have been in touch with Coach Grabill or Coach McEwen. Several have, and have work or family commitments. But we will be taking attendance, and players who do not attend practices regularly, particularly once school begins, may not be able to continue. The luxury of high numbers is the opportunity to request accountability. If you want to play Reserve soccer this year, demonstrate it by showing up, or making sure we know why you're not there. For now, address your communications to Coach Grabill. I have been in regular touch with many, some of whom cannot be there. Not's not an issue. But if you want to play, err on the side of telling me that. The players who attended tonight's meeting already have a huge head start in this respect. You get major points for showing up.
It was wonderful to see so many players and parents at the meeting tonight. I hope that it was informative. I need, however, to offer a slight rebuttal to tonight's guest speaker, Coach Linda Muri.
As we heard, she has a wonderful record of success as a coach and as a competitive rower. She has a degree from MIT. She was Head Coach of the Harvard men's lightweights. She has a world record.
I agree with the overall thrust of her main argument. I believe that it is a positive thing for student-athletes to play multiple sports. I have never suggested, and never will, that a Hanover soccer player focus on soccer at the expense of playing another sport. Asa Berolzheimer was an All-American last year, and he played basketball all four years. Many of our top players on this year's team are not just two-sport players, they are three-sport players.
Beyond that, I agree with the premise that playing multiple sports can prevent repetitive stress injuries, activate a wider range of muscle groups, and prevent burnout. All this is true, depending on which sports you are talking about. I've seen the studies. Care to guess which sport has one of the lowest frequencies of repetitive stress injuries? Correct. Soccer. It's clear why this is the case. You get stress injuries from playing sports where you do one thing over and over, like pitching a baseball, or working on the same gymnastic apparatus. Those sports are at the top of that table, as are most sports where you hold onto an implement and swing it: lacrosse, hockey and tennis rank pretty high.
Please, please anyone - show me a case study where soccer, even year-round, produces repetitive stress injuries. Wait, don't bother. You cannot.
Coach Muri made a big point of citing data from Ohio State Coach Urban Meyer, who described how many of his football recruits played other sports. Well, duh. No one could play football year round, given the astronomical rate of injuries: concussions, joint injuries, fractures. Even three months of playing football is a questionable decision. So to use that apples and oranges analogy to somehow infer that some sports are not in any way dangerous to play for several seasons, or even year-round, is ill-founded and disingenuous.
Coach Muri stated that she recruits rowers who play other sports in high school. Well, duh. Unless you row at an outlier like Hanover or one of the 60-70K preps, you have no chance to row before college, and a good program cannot depend on the small existing pool of rowers. So it's truly not applicable to the argument in favor of playing multiple sports.
A final point and I'll clam up. Guess my game-day competitive juices got flowing a bit early. I believe it was unfair and even a cheap shot to single out soccer players as examples of bad decision-making in terms of not playing multiple sports. Hanover soccer thrives with the help of athletes who play multiple sports, but it excels because there are also players who are dedicated to playing soccer year-round. I will do everything I can as a coach to support them and help them realize their dreams as players. I will guard their good health and never advise them to do anything that would jeopardize their long or short-term well being. I will scoff at the inference that playing a single sport will in any way limit them socially. Show me the studies for that unsubstantiated assertion, Coach Muri. Can you even show me an I-search on the subject?
Playing multiple sports is a very good idea for many high school athletes, and even most. But to suggest that this is the only way is incorrect, and I was uncomfortable hearing an otherwise well-qualified college coach suggest this.
I agree with Coach Grabill. I've spent a lot of time studying long-term athlete development. There are lots of good things about being a multi-sport athlete, but the data about repetitive stress injuries almost exclusively apply to arm injuries from overhead motions – motions that are not actually evolutionarily natural for the human body. Baseball, tennis, and swimming are the big three. The only repetitive use injuries reported with soccer are stress fractures from running too much, and of course this is not soccer specific and wouldn't be alleviated by switching to a different running sport in other seasons; running is running is running. Those rare cases (n=~0.2%) are not from too much soccer, but simply too much activity, and this is generally in kids who are going through excessive growth spurts.
ReplyDeleteThe bottom line is that kids should stay active and do what makes them happy. If they genuinely enjoy playing soccer year-round, there's nothing unhealthy about that.