The Wookiee League

Ready to bust out with "I'm a Little Tea Pot" at any moment!

The new kids on the block have been working hard over the summer and fall months. Their genes have blessed them with great height at such a young age--all are only 16 years old--three of them just last month! But gravity, super long femurs, tight hamstrings and school desks conspire against their spines. Muscles and tendons are desperately trying to keep up. So we move and groove, building awareness, alignment, mobility and strength in hopes of creating frames that will be mechanically resilient and resistant to the pounding these guys face on the basketball and volleyball court.

It takes time, patience and calories. And then more patience, more time, more calories, more reps, more sets, more purposeful mobility work to achieve the same movement competencies we ask of their shorter counterparts. For sure, each athlete has a few different tweaks to his programming and understands that he has specific issues to address. And I make sure to relate these issues to their long-term health, as well as their performance goals.

We cannot rush things with these guys. These guys truly put the "long" in long-term athletic development. Who knows when mother nature will be finished with them? It certainly won't be high school and it might not even be college. We must support the physical and emotional maturation process and hope that sport coaches and parents don't let height, hype and the desire to "play up" against older competition overwhelm their bodies.

Kelvin Giles and Mick McDermott put it very well in Developing the Total Player - An Integrated Strategy. I encourage you to check out the entire article.
In addition to these basic principles we must never forget that each individual player will require their own unique pathway to repeatable excellence. No two players are the same physically, mentally, technically or tactically and so the fundamental principles for all coaches to have in their tool-box are adaptability and flexibility. This is particularly important in the developmental stages of a player’s journey. The ‘before, during and after’ puberty periods present an array of ‘change’ unparalleled in a young person’s life. The difference in the rate of growth and development seen in a group of 11-15 year old players (male and female) is so profound that there can often be a 2-4 year biological difference between players of the same chronological age. Adaptability and flexibility become THE major tools for the coach during this time.

Comments

dan thacker said…
You're a little teapot! That is too funny. Great post. Very tall athletes must be very challenging but your/and their hard work is paying off. Great job.
10:53 AM
Joe Przytula said…
Well articulated Coach Fober. This is the realm I work in. What a mistake to apply strength/conditioning programs intended for elite on this age group! Yet it appears to be the status quo. How many S&C professionals just skip along this step in the career ladder in search of a more glamorous job? The result is a lack of solid, evidence based information on working with pubescent atheltes. Be sure to keep notes along the way (I mean that literally) and get that book out there!
8:38 AM
Anonymous said…
That's a great point about "mother nature" not being finished with them until years down the road. When I coached club-level college athletes, one of the weirdest things for me was freshmen boys. Many looked like they were 12: small, round heads, no lower jaw to speak of, wrists that looked like wet noodles and shoulders that barely made it past their ears. Others had jaws like cinderblocks, meat-hook hands, and shoulders that wouldn't fit through doorways. Same height and similar weights. Three years later they might all be an inch or two taller, and all look like men. But not at 18. Certainly not at 16.
4:17 AM
michaelchasetx said…
Great insight on the need for mobility work. My brother-in-law was 7'1" and blew out his knee in basketball @Old Miss ... I think maybe by poor squat technique & lack mobility.
1:56 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Form and Function

Image
Way back in 2002, I scanned these images by Howard Schatz from Sports Illustrated (October 14, 2002). A fascinating array of elite female athlete physiques, heights and weights, eh? These are some of the women featured in his book Athlete --a very cool pictorial essay that celebrates athletic form and function.
Read more

It's About Preparing People, not Preventing Injuries

ACL injuries do not happen in a void. People sustain injuries when their infrastructure is unable to manage a specific set of physical circumstances. To describe the mechanism of the injury without the context of the person and their level/type of sport, is to miss valuable insight. In sport, we prepare the person, to the best of our understanding, to meet the physical demands of that sport. We do not just work to prevent one particular injury; we prepare athletes to navigate the total sport physical environment. By "we" I mean the coaching and support staff -- specifically the athletic development staff.  Athletic development (AD) coaches prepare athletes through the development of physical literacy and movement competencies via movement progressions. It is more than strength, power, agility; it is the acquisition of knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviors to manage themselves within the entire sporting environment. At the higher levels of sport, AD coaches coordinate wit...
Read more

Strength: Overcoming Tradition & Assumptions

Image
The term "strength" comes with many images and stereotypes. The most common stereotype usually includes intimidating men who look like action figures, in spaces that look like iron jungles. Strength is associated with mass gain, limb girth increases, muscle hypertrophy and maximal force production against an external load. With regard to lower body strength, we speak in terms of multiples of bodyweight (BW), with the ratio of 2x BW historically viewed as necessary and desirable. We have historically trained in terms of 1 RM. There has been a trend recently to adopt a VBT (velocity based training) approach, as we know 1 RM changes on a daily basis and technology now allows us to more finely tune things with velocity as the target within each set. These things can be helpful as we initially learn to measure and document progress. But I think it is important to step back from this narrow outlook, because this view of strength does not serve all of us well, in either the rehab or...
Read more