Tiger Basketball Development
Miscellaneous Thoughts on How to Get Better
Vol. 1, No. 1
© 2008 Wesley Kumagai
This month, I have been thinking about how often certain injuries seem to occur in high school sports. The number of ACL injuries in women and girls at many levels has been well documented (if you are interested in further information on this subject, email me and I will either send you some citations or, if I hear from enough of you, perhaps do a future column on the subject). However, a different injury has struck a number of young athletes I know. My daughter, Zoe, plays on a varsity basketball team on which fully 25% of the current squad suffers from degenerative damage to one or more discs: bad backs.
Is this coincidence? Or something specific to La Canada? I think not a coincidence and, even if La Canada is on the leading edge of a trend, it is a trend coming to your neighborhood, too, if it is not there already.
I had a chance to speak with one of the best physical trainers in my area, an ex-All CIF wrestler and the best wrestling coach in La Canada HS history before he left coaching to spend more time with his family. Coach Williams reports that degenerative back problems are rife on the LCHS football team as well as the girls’ basketball team. He has a theory to explain this phenomenon. Because his theory is essentially the same as mine, let me summarize it:
Much more than even when he was a child (Coach Williams is a young 30-something), today’s children are just not very physically active. The only vigorous exercise that many children get is in organized sports, mostly team sports. Unfortunately, no organized youth sport provides balanced physical development. Even the best coached organized sports teams generally provide the players with a relatively narrow range of physical movements that are very repetitive. And, realistically, most youth sports teams do not much emphasize physical development; most time is spent on organization or other team concepts.
While children’s physical development patterns have changed in recent years, high school varsity practices and conditioning programs have not. Too often, today’s newbie varsity athletes lack the base of physical development necessary to support the rigorous demands of varsity sports, which include more violent changes of direction at higher speeds, longer and a higher number of games and physical contact with much bigger and faster opponents than youth sports.
Looking at the girls with the bad backs on Zoe’s team, a few patterns emerge. All of them developed the condition within a year of making the varsity, which in each case was their sophomore year. All of them had extensive backgrounds in youth team sports, but not much in individual sports or sports conditioning programs. They are actually among the quickest and most agile players of their respective sizes, but these attributes seem to stem from natural ability (or just playing a lot of basketball) without much conditioning.
How can we, as parents and coaches of pre-high school athletes, prevent our athletes from suffering such high rates of this debilitating condition (among others)? I have a few suggestions, based on my experiences as a youth coach, observation of high school athletics (including many high school athletes that I coached earlier in their athletic careers) and a lot of reading.
1. Children should engage in a broad range of vigorous, physical activities from a very young age, and keep up as many of them as long as you can.
CYC and JAO (or AYSO soccer games, or kids baseball or softball) games can be pretty competitive, but the physical demands in these games are quite predictable compared to a high school summer league game. The broader an athlete’s athletic experience, the better prepared they will be to handle unexpected and awkward situations that they will inevitably encounter at higher levels of competition. Playing a variety of sports is better than playing just one sport, sports emphasizing individual movement (e.g., martial arts, gymnastics, even swimming) are better for young athletes than socially complex team sports (t-ball, soccer, even basketball) and disorganized activity can be better than organized sports. (For example, I attribute much of my son’s later basketball success, and relative freedom from injury, to the popularity of Dance Dance Revolution – DDR – in his 5th -8th grade years.)
2. Young athletes should spend time developing the most demanding of the physical movements in their sport as soon as they are physically able to perform them. Practicing these physical fundamentals will not only make a player better, it will help the player avoid injuries in the future.
How many youth basketball teams do you see that work on full speed change of direction (slides, turn and sprint, etc.), diving for the ball, and falling to take a charge at every practice? How often does your child’s team work on them? Coaches, does every player on your team know the correct way to run? If not, when do you expect them to learn?
Do you think that players can become skilled at these things if they do not practice them? Do you think that they will be able to avoid having to do these things if they make their high school team? Who is more likely to be injured doing these things, players who are skilled at them or players who are unskilled at them?
Finally, should a child learn to do these things when they are in elementary school and weigh 40-60 pounds, or should they wait until they are in high school and weigh 110 – 160 pounds?
3. Start rigorous physical conditioning well before starting high school sports.
Several weeks ago, I watched our own Tiger intermediate skills clinic. For the overwhelming majority of the junior players I observed, neither skill level nor lack of aggressiveness is likely to be the main impediment to their succeeding at high school basketball. (The skill level was pretty high, in my opinion.) Most of the Tiger players needed, mainly, to get stronger, faster and more agile.
The average Tiger player that tries out for high school basketball is (a) above average in basketball skill and knowledge, and (b) below average in strength, speed and probably agility.
It is true that, in basketball as well as life, it is easy to spend too much time worrying about your weaknesses rather than taking advantage of your strengths. On the other hand, it is also true that CYC and JAO players more often fail to achieve at higher levels of basketball (or, worse, get injured) due to lack of physical strength and speed than due to lack of shooting or ball handling skills.
If a Tiger player really wants to play in high school (or beyond), I would highly recommend that they begin a serious strength and speed development program (at least 2 days of resistance training and 2 days of speed and agility training each week) as soon after their 12th birthday as they and their family can manage it.
What do you think of these suggestions? Please email me with your thoughts: wesley.kumagai@isza.com.
