“Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

Will Rogers

What's Ahead
Parents:
The President Says, "Play Sports"
Coaches:
Let Me Introduce Myself
Players:
Getting Back to Basics

Maine Youth Sports
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Why Parents Should Demand
Equal Opportunity Playing Time

As kids reach adulthood, an increased focus on team performance separates recreational players from the truly motivated ones. These players then feed the needs of competitive select teams, high school, college and professional programs. Until then, youth sports are more about developing motivation and talent than judging them. Parents facilitate their child's participation to help make their child better in life and to provide a chance at sports participation past puberty.

The selection of a good coach is a key way parents can help their child maximize his or her development as a person and a player. Before a season begins, it may be difficult to judge the technical skills of a coach. However, one quick test parents may use to size up a coach is to learn the coach's philosophy on equal opportunity playing time.

Equal opportunity playing time does not necessarily equate to, or guarantee "equal" playing time. A sport, whether played at the youth level or even collegiate level, is still about competition. Kids still need the opportunity to compete at practices as well as games.

Equal opportunity playing time allows the players to compete for playing time based on desire, dedication, and effort. Not solely on their talent level. This competition will make them stronger. The talent will follow. Equal opportunity playing time is not easy for coaches to implement. It forces them to put more effort into practices and player preparation. It also tests their priorities. If a coach's priority is to win above developing players and/or developing their program, then parents should look elsewhere to give their child the best chances of playing later on. Equal opportunity playing time should be one of a coach's core beliefs and not easily discarded during the course of competitive games.

Teams who practice equal opportunity playing time typically have more fun during a season since there are fewer conflicts over playing time between coaches and parents and among parents themselves. Attendance at practice, promptness, and effort to become a "team" player, are all measurable, and can be rewarded accordingly. Unequal playing time can quickly build resentments since parents cannot always be an objective judge of their own child's talent.

At the youth level, there isn't anyone that can predict a child's success in a particular sport 5 - 10 years down the road. However, we can increase the chances for success by offering equal opportunities.

10 Reasons for Equal Opportunity Playing Time

On most youth teams, there are players who are physically two or three years ahead of their teammates in size, speed or strength. These players often form a core of talent that coaches can use to their advantage to win games. Especially in youth travel and recreational teams, the temptation for many coaches is to use this talent more during a game to go for the win. While this method is appropriate at the higher levelsl of athletic competition, it seldom has any place in youth sports. Here are ten reasons why equal opportunity playing time is a better strategy:

1. Avoids contention between coaches and parents.Parents will not always objectively judge their own child’s abilities. No coach should expect objectivity from parents.
2. Avoids contention among parents. The resentments that can build between coaches and parents can often build among parents for the same reasons. More than a few youth teams have had successful seasons poisoned by hard feelings arising out of a coach’s game decisions.
3. Avoids contention among players. If players feel that coaches have favorites, they may stop trying their hardest.
4. Minimizes player fatigue. In tough physical games, coaches will lack skilled players if the top players are exhausted and lesser players have had limited game experience.
5. Maximizes player development. Without access to playing time and special situations, players cannot learn.
6. Simplifies coaching decisions. Coaches won’t have to guess which players are most likely to play well in a given situation.
7. Recognizes equal investments. Players and parents often make equal contributions away from the game in time and dollars and thus expect equal opportunities to game situations.
8. Improves team chemistry. When players feel everyone is treated fairly, they are more likely to focus on working together. When players feel they can succeed by making someone else look bad or themselves look better, they are learning the wrong lessons about team play.
9. Wins mean more to everyone. When everyone contributes to a win, there are no lingering resentments that will interfere with the celebration.
10. Better reflects coaching abilities. Winning games with kids who are physically more mature, or advanced talent wise, is more a success of drafting than coaching. Winning games by developing all the kids on a team is a better test of a coach’s abilities.

This is where a coach can really show his/her positive competitiveness with the approach that winning is not enough. Winning with everyone contributing is.

In professional sports, players do not get equal playing time. So, when is it appropriate for youth sports to mimic this behavior?

One test is when a team is not committed to individual players and rosters may be changed at anytime during a season.

When teams exist for the team’s sake and not the players’, as is the case in professional and collegiate sports, then coaches are left with no other choice than to give more time to their best players. However, until that test is true, coaches should make sure that the focus on development of all their players are equal.

Equal Playing Time Doesn't Mean Equal Playing Time

When players know they are going to have to play their fair share of a game, there is little excuse for arriving at a game mentally or physically unprepared. A commitment by a coach to play players fairly requires a commitment by players to try their hardest. When players do not fulfill their commitment, coaches are no longer obligated to fulfill their commitment.

Players can take advantage of these equal opportunities to help their team and their teammates by playing to the best of their abilities.

Lean Muscle: The 10 Commandments of Getting Cut

1. Thou shalt keep a food journal. No matter how good your plan is, the only way to make sure you're following it exactly is to keep a record of everything that goes in your mouth. Is that a pain in the butt? Yes, at first. Is it essential? Absolutely. Why? Two reasons. One, you're trying to create a consistent caloric deficit, which is tough to do if you don't know exactly how many calories you're consuming in a given day. Two, most of the eating plans that control insulin and help you lose weight are very specific about the ratios of carbohydrates, protein, and fat that you're consuming. Writing down what you eat is the best way to make sure that your ratios are correct.

   The best way to set up your food journal is whatever way makes it the most painless for you.

   You need to keep track of how many calories, grams of protein, grams of carbohydrates, and grams of fat you're taking in at what time of the day. That's the bare minimum. It's even better if you also track hunger levels, energy levels, and mood. This will help you fine-tune your diet to include more of the foods that fill you up and make you feel good.

   I like keeping my journal in a physical notebook--I use a Mead composition book--but others use Excel spreadsheets or Web journals like the one available at www.fitday.com. There is no best way: whatever makes it most convenient for you is the proper way to go.

2. Thou shalt do smart cardio. What do you think of when I mention cardio? An hour-long jog? A long, steady session on the exercise bike? Sweatin' to the oldies? If it's any of those things, you're doing cardio, but you're not doing smart cardio. There are lots of things you can do to burn calories, but if you're reading this article, you know that you want the calories you burn to come from fat, not lean mass. Traditional long, slow distance cardio burns muscle and fat pretty indiscriminately. In fact, if you do enough, you may find that your body burns muscle preferentially to ease the demands of doing so much aerobic work. That's exactly the opposite of what you want.

   So how do you do cardio without sacrificing precious muscle? The answer is interval work. Definitely get yourself cleared by a doctor before jumping into intervals, though, because the whole idea is to rapidly and repeatedly raise your heart rate, alternating the high heart rate work with brief recovery periods. The optimal way to do interval work is probably to do walkback sprints. Sprint all-out for 15 seconds, then turn around and walk back to where you started. It should take about 45 seconds to walk back. Once you're back where you started, sprint for 15 seconds again. Do seven sprints your first week, and add one sprint per week until you're up to 20 sprints per session.

   If you're not up for sprints, you can approximate them on an exercycle or an elliptical machine. Simply go all-out for 15 seconds, then pedal or walk at a recovery pace for 45. The same build-up pattern applies.

   Finally, if neither of these ideas appeals to you, you can try boxer-style cardio. Pull on a pair of bag gloves and pound the heavy bag for a minute, rest for a minute, jump rope for a minute, rest a minute, hit the heavy bag for a minute, etc. for the duration of your cardio session.

   Cardio should be done 2-3 days per week, preferably on days when you don't lift. If you have to do cardio on lifting days, try to do cardio in the morning and lift in the evening. If you have to do them in the same session, lift first. Under no circumstances should you ever do cardio before lifting, as you will be dramatically weaker.

3. Thou shalt train hard and heavy with the weights. Time to explode another old training myth. For years, people have been saying that you need to use heavy weights and low reps to bulk up, and lighter weights and higher reps to get cut. This is just plain wrong. Getting cut has much more to do with how you eat than how you train. Ditto for bulking up. With that said, you want to train in such a way that your body will retain as much muscle mass as possible; just like you can't flex fat, you can't look ripped without muscle.

   So what do I mean by hard and heavy? During this time, you want to be doing primarily compound exercises that involve a lot of muscle: squats, deadlifts, bench presses, bent-over rows, pull-ups, power cleans, snatches, military presses, dips.

   And you want to be training for strength. This is not the time for doing three sets of 12. Bump up the weight and go for five sets of five or even 10 sets of 3. Hold your rest in between sets to about a minute, and make the weight heavy enough that you're struggling to finish that final set.

4. Thou shalt not fall victim to the myth of spot reduction. This is the big one that seems to get people who want to lose weight or see their abdominal muscles for the first time. Doing a billion crunches won't do a thing to burn the fat obscuring your abdominal muscles. The abductor/adductor machine (the "leg spreader") won't do a thing to reduce the size of your thighs. Step-ups will firm up the muscles of the butt and upper hamstrings, but they won't burn the fat there. Fat is burned by creating a caloric deficit and training the entire body with resistance exercise and smart cardio. That's the only effective way to deal with your "problem areas," whatever areas they may be.
5. Thou shalt keep a training journal. A training journal is never as important as when you're trying to lose body fat. Your training journal is going to provide some of your most valuable feedback on how well your diet is working for you. You're not likely to get a lot stronger while dieting down unless you're relatively new to lifting weights, but if your training journal shows that your lifts are going down, it's a pretty good indication that you're restricting calories too severely and possibly burning muscle as well as fat.

   Again, you can keep your training journal in a variety of formats. The most important information to record is the time of day, the exercises you do, the poundages you use for those exercises, the number of sets and reps you complete, and how it feels. This information will provide you with valuable feedback not just about your diet but about how your body responds to exercise. It's also the beginning of a continuous log that will show you how much progress you've made since you started working out and let you see at a glance what your most effective workout programs have been.

   These commandments aren't glamorous, and they call for a good deal of hard work, but if you follow them religiously, you just might find that they'll lead you to the promised land of a lean, sexy physique.

Stay tuned for the next issue as we go through commandments 6 through 10.

Chris McClinch is an Arlington, VA-based bodybuilder and personal trainer. He won the middleweight title at the 2001 International Natural Bodybuilding Federation's collegiate national championships. As a trainer, he specializes in physique transformation and sport-specific strength training preparation.

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