It’s not Conditioning It’s Training, as long as…
It’s not conditioning it’s training, and not even training, if we are not teaching. Conditioning is Pavlovian. That is, every time I do this, they do that. That’s not training. It’s brain-washing, manipulating, mechanizing, automacizing. Is that what we are really after when we hold practice to prepare them for the upcoming contest? Training is […]
The Most Powerful Advice I Ever Received: “Just because it failed doesn’t mean you’re a failure”
Just because it failed, doesn’t mean you’re a failure. I heard this for the first time when I was in my early 20’s. Having completed an arduous laboratory experiment which required many repetitions over weeks of work, I could draw a conclusion about my hypothesis: it was wrong. Trial after trial proved my result: negative. […]
Ice Skating for Fun, Fitness and Sport Begins with a Good Teacher, by Cecily Morrow
Editor’s note: Cecily Morrow, accomplished professional ice skater and expert instructor, offers the first of her guest posts regarding safe and healthy ice skating. Cecily and I share a love of sport and a desire to teach it in a way that inspires healthy competition and lifelong participation. (Find more about Cecily and her instructional […]
Add Injury Prevention to Your Dynamic Warm-Up in 2 Minutes
Are you doing all you can to protect your players from tearing their ACLs? Instituting a regular dynamic warm-up is an important first step toward keeping our athletes healthy. In my last post, The Dynamic Warm up, Why Do it?, we looked at the three primary reasons players need to warm up. If you don’t have a fixed warm-up, […]
The Dynamic Warm-Up, Why Do it?
This week I met with a group of high school basketball players starting their pre-season conditioning. They headed straight for the end line to start warm-ups, and then … waited for me to tell them what to do. Me: Do you have a standard warm up? Players: (looking at each other) Uh, not really. Me: […]
Are we returning injured players to sport too soon?
Why do so many kids not only keep getting injured, but keep getting re-injured?! The biggest risk factor for injury isn’t over-training or lack of fitness, poor coaching or poor preparation. It isn’t even reckless play. The biggest predictor of injury by far, is previous injury. Kids who’ve been injured before and are attempting to return […]
Because We Care More About the Kids than the Soccer
I did something I have never done before at a Fit2Finish soccer session recently. I scrapped my complete injury prevention training plan, and we spent the whole 40 minutes talking, stretching and mending. Why? Because all but one of the players in the group were injured! Several told me they would be training later that evening […]
USWNT Head Coach Jill Ellis: Lessons for Success at Urban Soccer Symposium 2017
With Jill Ellis headlining the US Soccer’s Urban Soccer Symposium event, who’s gonna miss the opening kickoff? Not me. Coach Ellis lived up to her billing. Well-spoken, on-point, honest, and humbled by the recent poor (by USA standards) showing of the US Women’s National Soccer Team in the 2016 Olympics, Ellis provided some gems to coach by — […]
Adults Need Play, Too
Play is too important to be left only to children, says Jennifer Wallace in the May 23 issue of the Washington Post Health Section. “It offers a sense of engagement and pleasure, takes the player out of a sense of time and place, and the experience of doing it is more important than the outcome.” We are […]
Recruiting to Win is Easy, Building to Win Takes Talent
In the last 15 years I have watched the youth athletic field transform from playground to competitive cauldron. As college programs expanded, dangling the promise of scholarship dollars, and sports clubs upped the ante with paid coaches and select teams, the win at all costs (WAAC) culture came of age. Somewhere, we left a lot of […]