#RNH

One of the best coaches I ever had the pleasure of working with is a man by the name of John Bartholomeo. He is the owner and founder of a crossfit box in Utica, N.Y. called, Mohawk Valley Wellness. The best life lesson I learned in addition to the varying lifts, social skills, networking and In Body readings was the daily awareness and monitoring of my Rest, Nutrition, and Hydration. Being the true coach that I am, I thought to myself, this no brainer concept could be the small difference maker for any of my teams or clients success.

I define success as the daily follow-throughs that our team commits to at the beginning of each season. What about winning each game? The conference? Making NCAA’s? Of course, anyone competing in our conference wants to win, especially after 4 teams were taken to the NCAA’s last year for the 64 team tournament. The successes that I want to draw upon are indeed, the small daily standards that we set for ourselves including on our days off. These daily standards might look like this:

• Completing the wellness questionnaire before 9:00am
  
• Scheduling an appointment with the athletic trainer or coffee with a professor you’ve been meaning to catch up with
  
• Actively going out of your way to be a good person, helpful member of our campus community, or reaching out to a teammate who missed an open goal to tie the game
  
• Showing up to the reserve/practice squad blow out on your day off
  
• Taking the time to breathe, meditate, pray or journal about struggles and gratitude
  

This holistic approach to the student-athlete experience is nothing new but is increasingly difficult to put in place with the limited resources most college programs face day-to-day. With higher education becoming more and more expensive and national budget cuts left and right, you have to locate those small wins as many times a day as you can in order to separate yourself from the rest of the pack. To put this to a test, the next time you are visiting a college/university ask the head coach a series of questions regarding athletic training accessibility, strength & conditioning coaching, team equipment that monitors the health & welfare of the team, dining hall access and other eateries on campus, and last but not least the access and size of its campus health center. For every program that has their competitive season in the Fall you have approximately 2 weeks of pre-season to figure out how many of your athletes followed the summer packet and which of them either a) burned out through a lack of rest days in their schedule or b) sat on their backside all summer and will be dropping like flies on the first day due to exhaustion and pulled hamstrings. The challenges of summer become real for fall sport athletes and coaches and so it’s important to create a culture of mindfulness and body-mind appreciation throughout the academic year so that these athletes have the tools in place prior to leaving campus for the summer.

Cultivating a mindset of daily check-ins can be exhausting, for all parties involved. Anything worth having in life takes sacrifice and lots of hard work. Thankfully, with the knowledge that I have gained through graduate school, my coaching buddies, CSCS qualification and sheer passion to help my team be the best they can be I have learned that if you are willing to be creative you can implement certain tools that can aid in the process of encouraging the individuals on your team to monitor their own well-being and health. Since we have been doing this for over a year, I felt that now was the time to graduate into the world of wearable health monitoring technology. Thanks to a kind and generous donation we were able to invest in a premiere product called Beyond Pulse. 

“Beyond Pulse is the ultimate soccer coaching diagnostic tool, empowering coaches with critical health data, resulting in better training, improved player health and performance.”

I tried the product with my club team last summer and was really surprised and impressed by how much the players themselves were interested in seeing the data. For players as young as U15 they were able to engage in the data and also enjoy the online education section of the website. This isn’t just one of those companies that charges you $5k + for a pile of belts and asks you to carry your laptop around in the rain with an antenna on your head. It’s the most simplistic tool out there and since the players are by far way smarter than me, it helps that everything is accessible through the app and instantaneous. 

For club soccer, this is one tool where you can educate the players that there is more to the college athlete than just training and playing time. The other 20+ hours in the day will determine how those training hours will affect the following sessions. As I’ve told my own college players who expect instantaneous success overnight, when you plan to take a study abroad trip and you realize that you’ll need “x” amount of money to eat, travel and purchase basic necessities, do you have that chunk of money just sitting in your bank right now? The answer is quite often, “No!”. When I ask them how they will go about ensuring that they will have that lump sum before takeoff they’ve already thought out how much they earn per week, what they will need to cut out in order to set aside the desired weekly amount that should comfortably hit their saving goals. On the outset, $50 per week doesn’t seem like a lot, especially if you were to look at it from a daily investment. That $20 XL pizza doesn’t seem like a lot either but eventually you realize that it hurts any gains you had hopes of achieving. Over time though, that $50 is looking pretty swole in the bank after 6 months or so and slowly but surely you start to feel proud and hopeful of the short-term goals you set out to achieve. Performance and wellness are no different. Taking the time to ice bath and do some extra recovery in your daily routine add up to a weekly healthy benefits. Doing your best in the dining hall to get as much of the right food as possible into your body adds up to fueling bigger and stronger muscles. Avoiding too many late nights and procrastinating throughout the day can give you an edge over your opponent even 5 days later. These all seem like silly, hopeless and pointless acts of self-kindness but actually they are the beginning of the wonderful butterfly effect. I have struggled a lot recently with both of my club teams in their efforts to ensure that they are fully fueled and hydrated for the game. I talked to them about having standards for yourself and followed up with, “Does anyone here forget to brush their teeth in the morning??” Of course, they squirmed but they were able to relate to the madness of not brushing one’s teeth. This isn’t really any fault of their own since they’re bouncing from sport to sport and summer camp to summer camp with nobody taking the time to address their wellness and nutritional needs. Parents are more central to this epidemic than we as coaches give them credit for but how many club environments do you know with a parent education program and curriculum? I don’t know many. Additionally, parents lack the education themselves or are misguided by the common myths about protein, carbohydrate and fats vs their own personal pursuits of fitness and health. You can’t argue with the data that suggests that we’re not getting any healthier.

As a college coach, I have spent more time building relationships with my players and staff; listening to my players highs and lows with both academia and soccer as well as helping them navigate the complexities of being a college student-athlete. It really is 80% managing people (their minds and their bodies) and 20% X’s and O’s. I would argue that the professional world of sports isn’t too far off of that number with the exception that they have more staff and agents on hand to manage the wide-ranging factors that affect one’s performance at the elite level. We have seen an influx of doctors, psychologists, nutritionists, hydrationists and sleep doctors on the sidelines. Even in the college arena they are increasing. My goal here has been to share some of my own thoughts and experiences when working with youth and collegiate players and hope that all of us can continue to develop our players beyond the whiteboard. From the youth level, we can begin to monitor and track these small daily wins so that the transition to college is somewhat seamless. It goes without saying: we all want our teams to be successful and we all want to win, but after college most of these players aren’t going to the pro’s and I would argue that we all want our loved ones and players to live long and healthy lives. Your health is your wealth. That’s championship winning to me.