Steve Christilaw: Today’s players are indeed bigger, faster and stronger
Friday night lights have a wonderful way of measuring the change of seasons.
High school football, the quintessential fall sport, starts in the heat of summer. Its first games come as we celebrate Labor Day, the last big weekend of the season.
Those first games start in the beauty that is late-summer twilight. By the second or third week, there is a crispness to the air at kickoff. By Week 5, it’s officially autumn and a 7 p.m. kickoff happens under the lights, and there are winter jackets, gloves and scarves adorning the faithful even while diehard coaches still sport cargo shorts and T-shirts on the sidelines.
Before long there will be a fog forming around the grandstand that grows with every exhalation, and the brass section in the pep band will begin holding their mouthpieces in their hands or pockets lest their lips freeze to the metal.
If only all changes to the game came with such noticeable speed.
More often than not, you need the distance that only time can offer to see just how the game has adapted to new technologies and new knowledge.
Wandering the remodeled West Valley High School always seems to offer that kind of distance, along with a healthy dose of “I remember when …”
On Monday I dropped by the school’s weight room, where the football team was going through a few skills tests to measure its speed and agility. While they waited, some players tested themselves with some competitive bench pressing.
In the decade since the school was remodeled, the benefits of the weight room, which has a second-floor view of Ward Maurer Field, have grown more and more obvious. You could say the same about the effect the same type of facility has had on athletes at Central Valley and University after those new buildings opened.
Athletes have gotten bigger. Stronger. More athletic.
When I was a student at West Valley, the “weight room” was an oversized closet that housed an old Universal Gym.
“When I got to college, I had never been in a weight room,” West Valley coach Craig Whitney said. “I didn’t even know how to go about using one. I needed to get help to figure it out.”
Now students can take weight training as a class.
“Hunter Wright, our quarterback last year, is a perfect example of what a kid can accomplish if they apply themselves in the weight room,” Whitney said. “When he got here as a freshman he weighed 93 pounds. By the time he graduated he was 180 pounds of solid muscle. He almost doubled in size.”
To be fair, there was some genetic involvement in that transformation. Most young men go through a growth spurt between their freshman and sophomore year. But doubling in size is an amazing accomplishment.
“Believe it or not, we have some football players who hadn’t been in here until today,” Whitney said. “It was important for us to have our freshmen and sophomores with us today. Normally they have a JV game today, but there isn’t one this week. We want them to see what our dedicated upperclassmen do to make themselves better players.”
Whitney’s son, Connor, is part of the current crop of success stories. And he was an easy sale for the coach.
“Connor set a goal for himself when he first got here,” his proud dad said. “He wants to play college football and he wanted to be 200 pounds by the time he was a senior.”
For a while it looked like he might fall 6 or 7 pounds short of his goal by the time it came to get official heights and weights listed for the program.
“He asked me, ‘If I’m a pound or two short, you’ll let me round up to 200 pounds, right dad?’ ” the senior Whitney laughed. “I told him, ‘I will not. You’re just going to have to put in some extra work and get there if you want it.’ And he did.”
One of the biggest changes over the years has been the emphasis coaches and trainers have put on the core muscle groups. It’s not just about creating athletes with six-pack abs.
Strengthening the core has a direct influence on athleticism. It’s a building block for strength and quickness.
And it goes a long way toward making players less vulnerable to the kinds of nagging injuries, strained abdominal muscles, strained groin muscles, that used to cost players several games.
“That’s been huge,” the coach said. “It helps that we have certified trainers on staff to help kids when they do get dinged up and that helps get them back on the field faster. But better conditioned athletes just don’t get hurt as much. Not the way they used to.”