Fitness, Performance, Recovery

 How Youth Soccer Harms Our Young Players
Updated with suggested reading 10.27
Re-Posted 9/2/12 For LMSC Readers

Why is this problematic?  Kids can handle it, right?

    Looking at the data we've collected from the men's program at Colgate, we've confirmed an interesting (and compelling) piece of information.  The reason I post it here is largely to provide further support to the OSSC approach of insisting on one game per week, maximum, and to discourage anyone reading who has any input on the high school schedules from exceeding that.  Unlikely, I know, but in the vein of satisfying due diligence, here we go.




    It is fairly evident at the top level why they play once per week, superficially.  They prepare a great deal, and play at an incredible rate, with tackles, collisions and impact far exceeding most amateur levels.  Add in travel (though many of our colleges travel much further than the European domestic leagues, to say nothing of MLS who go coast-to-coast regularly) and it's pretty simple.

    However, when we look at actual physiological data (and here I do not purport to be anything approaching an expert) taken by our heart rate monitoring system with the Colgate men's team, it is starkly clear that after a game played on Tuesday evening, the majority of the players who play the whole game are fully recovered (taking into account training loads Wed/Thurs/Fri) by the middle of the night on Friday.  This works out well for the Colgate men, because Patriot League scheduling has them playing once per week (Saturdays only) in league play.  The image below is a graphical representation of a year's worth of data on a Colgate player being used to predict his attaining full recovery from the game this Tuesday evening.

The tall vertical line is the game at Binghamton on a Tuesday night.
Full recovery is achieved  by  23.00 hours on Friday night.  Click picture to enlarge.

    This player played the full 90, and his chart is essentially the same as every other player who played so many minutes.  Recovery for a player who played limited minutes typically looks like this:

Less minutes, fitter player (possibly) = lower "training load" and quicker
recovery.  Click picture to enlarge.

This player's recovery time is faster by a full day.  He's also very fit, and so will recover faster than someone who is less fit.  The steep day-after drop off shows how quickly he can recover though another factor is; the work load is much lower, about 160 points, which is mainly due to the lower volume of work done.  Now, the first player is one we simply cannot sub out.  The second is a guy who plays a position at which we can sub much more freely without seeing a significant drop-off in effectiveness.  It shows how subbing can be helpful (to say nothing of attaining a high level of fitness) but it is so rare to be able to sub effectively more than 2-5 guys deep.

The starters (players who played a full 90
or very close to it) did only the items in red.

Knowing all this, we use that information the day after a game to inform our practice plan.  The document to the left shows what a typical day-after-a-match training session looks like at Colgate (industry standard stuff.)  Knowing that our players won't be fully recovered until Friday night, we have to design sessions that enhance the fitness of the reserve players who didn't play, or only played limited minutes.  Most NCAA DI programs are following some version of this logic.

There is no punitive motivation; the reserve players are not being trained because they didn't play.  They are being trained because when we need them to play, their fitness level must be optimal, if a game day is a day off for them, their fitness level will drop.  Consider this: the training session the day before a game is too short and of low intensity to improve (or even maintain) fitness...if the player doesn't play next day in the game, and then gets a day off after the game (as the starters do) that's three days off a week minimally, and his fitness level will suffer, and quickly.

    It's not rocket science, but it does show an application of scientific knowledge based on the data in the chart above to the real-world situation of needing to improve the team (versus just giving the boys a day off) without doing invisible harm physiologically.  It shows a care for the players (and the meaningfulness of the season) that we so carefully manage our players on a weekly basis.

    What causes concern at the youth level is the still-prevalent attitude that games count more in a player's development, and that playing more games can't possibly cause harm.  The five games in 7 days that OHS put their varsity through (especially given that the team isn't that deep...plus or minus, against VVS in a tight game on Monday night, they used a handful of subs by my count, 4 or 5 kids) is an example of the disregard for the risk to young players by the administrators who create the leagues and schedules.

    There really is no reason for high school programs to play 18 regular season games.  Our club, at the U19 age group played 8 league games and 4 tournament matches between May 1 and July 31st.  High schools don't need to play home and away series with their league opponents.  It would be simpler, and more exciting, to simply play each other once, award a point for a draw, three for a win and zero for a loss (as do college leagues across the nation, as well as the pros...though they'll play many more games than the amateurs, anyway) and the top two/three/four or whatever go to the tournament.  Fewer games, more training and recovery = a better game (broadly,) better performances (individually,) and far less concern about burn-out and overuse injuries.

From a dedicated reader of 192 Square Feet:  A great book about sport specialization, injuries, and the epidemic of young women forced out of sport by poor training and competition schedules (as well as myriad other factors) http://www.michaelsokolove.com/warrior_girls.htm