St. X Football Week 1
We are only four days from our first game of the 2008 season. The Bombers will be playing city rival Colerain Cardinals. This is a repeat matchup from last years Regional 4 final. This matchup should provide both teams a good first game to see what pieces will continue to work throughout the season.
On our part, we have been preparing since the first week of January. From the very beginning we understood what the goals were; to get a group of juniors that had backed up some quality seniors for two years to beleive they are ready enough with themselves to compete in 2008. We began our training program with basic testing. The testing gave us ideas as to what we would implement in the off-season. Our emphasis from the very beginning was proper kinetics, hypertrophy and strength.
Any time you start a young group of athletes in a new training program, you are going to need a thorough orientation process. So we began educating our kids with the basics. Basic movements geared towards improving ankle, knee, hip and shoulder stability and movement efficiency. Once we were comfortable, we moved them into the hypertrophy and strength phases.
Summer training began the second week of June. This gave us nineteen (19) training sessions to get our guys into playing shape for camp. Our goal was to focus on total development. We took all the most important pieces from the off-season and tweaked them to focus on power, speed and quickness.
During the off-seson we got a chance to participate in the SPARQ Team Challenge. For those of you who don't know, The SPARQ Challege tests athletic teams from around the country in football specific tests. After we tested, our scores showed that we had placed in the elite level with a 90+ score. The funny thing about this was, we had never performed much speed and agility work. Our total focus up to that point in April was hypertrophy and strength. This proved a point that I had thought of months before. Would building hypertrophy and strength, the size and strength of the muscle, help us generate more power output, which in turn improve our scores with just some basic technique work? Well it did. This was good to know, because now we were on the right track.
Summer emphasis was on speed, agility and quickness. When working with competitive athletics its important to have your guys ready to perform from day one of camp. During summer workouts our guys worked hard and with good focus. Colerain as a first game matchup can keep your kids focused pretty good on its own.
We went through double sessions the first two weeks of August. As a strength and conditioning coach, this is the time of year when you have to keep your eyes open and your game plan ready for adjustment. Up to this point everyone of your players looks good. But guys are going to get dinged up and hurt once the hitting starts and you have to have a plan for everyone of those players.
Hamilton was our last scrimmage before Colerain. Next day films and conditioning went as planned. We got they guys introduced to the in-season program, loosened them up, stretched them out and finished our day.
Today is Monday, just four days away from our first game. We've been waiting a long time for this matchup and its finally upon us. On that fateful night August 22 at 8:15pm in Nippert Stadium, St. X and Colerain will meet again.
