Girls Being Run Ragged Stress, Injuries Mount As Dual Soccer Seasons Don’T Double Their Pleasure

FROM SPORTS MENU page C2 (Wednesday, October 27, 1999): Replay Mead soccer player Holly Ready was misidentified in a photo caption in Tuesday’s final edition.

Parents are fed up and their daughters are beat up.

Five of Chuck Hartshorn’s soccer players on the River City Steelers under-15 girls premier team regularly complain of shin splints.

And that’s just the beginning.

Last week, one player was out with three broken bones in her right foot. Another had a deep thigh bruise. The goalie missed two weeks after getting kicked in the cheekbone. One player always has pain and inflammation around her knees and another is nursing a sore back.

Hartshorn hardly has enough healthy bodies to hold a practice.

Injuries are bound to happen when you’re playing soccer seven days a week. Coaches know it. Parents know it. Players know it.

And they want to change it.

Girls high school and club soccer coexist during the fall season. Serious players do both, which often means they’re competing in five games a week. College coaches often scout the large club tournaments.

Many involved want the girls club season to be played in the spring, but the Washington State Youth Soccer Association says there aren’t enough fields.

The WSYSA wants the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association to change the high school girls season to the spring. The WIAA says it has the same problem: a shortage of fields.

So what’s going to change? For now, nothing.

The WSYSA spent its summer retreat talking about the dilemma, said executive director Tony Screws, and formed a committee to meet with the WIAA about switching the girls high school season.

The WIAA said no.

“The fact girls are playing both high school and youth soccer at the same time, we realize there’s a stress factor,” Screws said. “We don’t have a solution.”

Screws said all the options have been explored and none work. In 1998, participation in youth soccer was at 124,000 and Screws expects the number to exceed 130,000 when he gets the count for 1999. The WSYSA supervises 10,000 matches a weekend.

Hartshorn believes there are options. In Idaho and Oregon, girls play their club season in the spring.

Idaho has had to develop more fields to try and meet the demands of expanded schedules and interest, said Jim Coleman of Coeur d’Alene, first president for Idaho Youth Soccer and interim commissioner for District 1.

With boys and girls club seasons in the spring, girls teams are traveling as far as western Montana for games because the schedule doesn’t jibe with Washington, Coleman said.

The Idaho High School Activities Association doesn’t allow a player to compete in both club and high school sports at the same time.

“Every state is different,” Coleman said. “This isn’t just a problem Washington faces. They also have the same problems in Northern and Southern California and Arizona. A lot of it is the way the club level of competitive soccer is set up. Washington is more of a year-round season and that is going to interfere if they have a high school program.”

So players must choose one or the other or both, Coleman said.

Hartshorn says it doesn’t have to be that way. He has drafted a proposal to the WSYSA that asks for the girls season to be moved to spring. The proposal officially will come from a Spokane Valley Junior Soccer Association committee and Hartshorn expects it to be sent sometime within the next 30 days.

In the meantime, all he can do is remind his athletes to get adequate rest, drink plenty of water, stretch out, keep up on their homework and maintain a good attitude.

“They have to do the best they can with all the demands on their body,” said Hartshorn, 40, a software engineer for Hewlett Packard whose daughter, Cheryl, is a freshman playing for him as well as for the playoff-bound Central Valley varsity.

Gonzaga Prep junior Kim Cathcart, who plays for the Premier 1 Spokane Valley Flash, says she’s been lucky not to aggravate injuries she suffered in club play during the summer. Recently, she had seven games in 10 days.

Cathcart pulled her right hamstring and rolled her right ankle in the summer. She wore an ankle brace during the Bullpups’ season and ices the ankle when it gets sore.

“It can get a little bit fatiguing,” she said of playing so much soccer. “But you get used to it after a while and learn how to pull through it.”

It would be more convenient for girls to have their club season in the spring, Cathcart said.

But since that won’t be happening at this point, area high school coaches have come up with their own ideas.

“Of course we hate it,” said Gonzaga Prep coach Christian Birrer.

Birrer would like to see a league of just Eastern Washington teams, maybe with a North Idaho team or two. He says that would cut down on travel and the number of games in a weekend.

Western Washington teams don’t deal with the problem to the same degree because with milder weather their seasons go into December so they don’t have to play twice a weekend. Many West Side teams won’t travel this way for games, forcing Spokane-area teams to travel the round trip in two days, said Hartshorn.

Travis Hanson, coach of Greater Spokane League-champion Mead, said he is exploring the idea of fielding a Mead-only club team made up of the Panthers’ junior varsity and varsity. The coaches would rotate with weekend duties and would be able to better keep track of players’ injuries.

“Since they’re choosing to play on the weekend, we could find a healthy balance by combining them into one,” Hanson said. “It doesn’t lighten their playing load, but it lightens the practice load and allows for coaches to monitor their activity.”

This idea is only in the preliminary stages and Hanson said he would not keep a player from her regular club team if that’s where she felt most comfortable. And he said by no means is he trying to form an exclusive North Side team and step on the toes of other club coaches.

Meanwhile, WIAA executive director Mike Colbrese said he expects his board to revisit the issue.

“I don’t know how my board will respond,” Colbrese said. “They were not very receptive to my last request. At this point, the issue has been driven by youth soccer folks, not schools. If we start hearing concerns from athletic administrators from schools saying we need to take a look at this thing, certainly we would want to take a look at it.”

Hartshorn sure hopes so.

He partly blames his team’s drop in the club standings this season to too much soccer.

“It’s a result of overplaying and lack of practice,” Hartshorn said. “It’s demoralizing to the girls and makes it difficult to enjoy the great game of soccer.”