TJS

TJS

There have been a number of Tommy John Surgeries this season to MLB pitchers. Many outstanding medical people have weighed in with a tremendous amount of thought, reasoning, and data. I am not and will not ever be qualified to speak to the medical reasons for this recent rash of TJ surgeries. Even the eminently qualified medical people do not have an agreed upon reason or solution for the problem.

There is a group that believes, and rightly so, that all the pitching these kids are doing at an early age is a probable cause that shows up later in life. Whether it is throwing to many curve balls, elite travel teams, showcases, or pitch counts, kids today are throwing year round more than ever. There are some that believe the pitchers are throwing harder than ever and this is causing stress on the elbows. Others believe that it is “in” to have TJ surgery as quickly as possible when pain occurs because of the success rate.

What we have done at Frozen Shorts, when I was coaching little league, all the way up to U19 travel baseball, was concentrate on the mental aspect. I even asked my pitcher, when I went out to visit him on the mound with, all the infielders standing around, with the bases loaded in championship game, what he liked on his pizza. I told him I liked everything but anchovies. He looked at me, smiled and relaxed, struck out the last batter to win the game.

 All the way back to when my father was President of the Rochester Red Wings, then the Triple A  minor league franchise for the Baltimore Orioles, I noticed how much better athletes performed when they were relaxed and having fun. They were still very competitive, but the fun seemed to enhance their abilities, not deter them.

I garnered all this information, while continuing to learn and observe while I was a head coach in college hockey for 21 years. Athletes, when they had experienced peace of mind, still had the ability to get excited and perform at a high level. I evoked humor in high pressure situations, even telling a joke in the locker room in a tight playoff game, and asking my players if they were having any fun playing tight. I gave my players every Sunday and Monday off and we never practiced hockey the day after a game.

Now I am not saying that there is a comparison to MLB and all the pressure they have on them each and every game to win, to what I do. But there is a parallel. I believe that each team should have a masseuse on staff. They should also have a yoga instructor on staff and do yoga every day. Players should be given a break during the season. Do something different for a day. The day to day grind adds negative stress.

Now stress, whether it be the good stress, or the bad stress has a cost. Athletes today are bigger stronger and faster than they were even 30 years ago. But in the history of the world, 30 years is a micro second of a nano second in time, so the athletes achieved this superior talent through technology, and technology has a cost.

We are seeing both mental and physical stress and injuries to our young children that mirror what professional athletes are enduring. That should not be. We should embrace the fact that they are children and still growing and learning. We should allow them to have fun in a safe and nurturing environment, not one filled with pretend life lessons of winning and losing, toughness, and fake character building, that will never apply to them later in life.

Our Journey for your journey

  I have been interviewing Doctors, certified athletic trainers, professional athletes, amateur players, coaches, athletic directors, a professional sports agent, and ex players. You can see all our interviews so far, and there are many more to come, at frozenshorts.com. We would like to teach people about the journey through youth sports, high school, and college, and its long term ramifications on both children and adults in its current form.

            Through my research in the areas of science, psychology and the collection of data, I have found a disturbing trend toward one sport year-round participation. Injuries, both physical and mental, are appearing at an alarming rate to the children playing  both one and multiple youth sports year round without proper structured rest. More than 3.5 million children under the age of 14 went to hospitals in 2012 with sports related injuries.

             Proper and adequate rest is essential for long term health.  Of all ten-year old children playing youth sports, 70% quit by the age of thirteen.  Diabetes and obesity are on the rise, and I believe they are connected to youth sports and the mantra of winning. 

             I'm a huge believer in choice, but to make a good choice you have to have as many facts as possible.      

            We believe strongly that children should be able to play youth sports for fun. They need balance in their lives not specialization. They are not mini adults or micro professional athletes. They are children and let’s embrace that natural organic fact and nourish, with a holistic approach, for the children’s long term best interest.

The Frozen Shorts Training method encompasses and embraces human nature and the fundamental ,life skills needed for the children to become healthy, contributing members of society when they reach adulthood. The basic needs of safety, mental and physical health, a sense of community and responsibility, as well as the balance needed to face adversity and feel comfortable taking risks, is an essential part of our training methodology.

S.H.E.L.S.

Frozen Shorts would like to introduce to the general public our new mantra for youth and High School sports. It is called S.H.E.L.S.

 We believe for 99% of the children playing youth and high school sports this  should be the fundamental base of what children and adults should be looking for when they participate in youth and high school sports. Our paradigm can be summed up in this way.

S.H.E.L.S. stands for safety, health, education, and life skills.

Safety should be and will always be to me the #1 concern for children playing sports. Last year alone, $1.25 BILLION was spent on youth and high school sports overuse injuries with Doctor and hospital visits.40% of those injuries happened to children under the age of 14. 60% of those injuries happened to kids at practice. Alarming is just one word that comes to mind.

Health is very simple. Dr. James Andrews, who is one of the top Sports Orthopeadic Surgeons in the country, says that health is the leading indicator for an athlete’s future success form an early age. Let’s be clear here. It isn’t size, strength, speed, weight or what team you play on.

Education. There are 77 times more non athletic scholarships that there are athletic ones. Children need to come out of college with some experience and lack of debt. Now you can argue that the athletic scholarship is a way to go, but I counter with this. The total amount of money you spend on your child’s athletic journey will, for the most part, outweigh any athletic scholarship. Keep them engaged in learning, get good grades, join clubs and stay active. These things will help children the most for  later life.

I believe strongly that we have gotten away from teaching the proper life skills to children. When is the last time you had to run laps at work when you made a mistake?

When is the last time you had to do pushups at work? If sports are a microcosm of life the life skills we teach our children in youth and high school sports have too radically change. Cooperation and sharing should be the norm. Toughness and character development should take the form of honesty and integrity, not winning and exclusion.

Toughness should be when you befriend and embrace a kid in school who is not very important or is being bullied. Character should be about admitting a mistake, without fear of retribution.  Mistakes should not be classified as failure. They should be teaching lessons for the kids.

More and more I hear parents talking about their children “Falling behind” in youth sports. I understand completely their angst and paranoia. They are constantly being bombarded with the mantra that more is better. Bigger is better. The “keep up with the Joneses” mentality is pervasive in youth sports and society.

Parents are trying to keep up in a race that doesn’t exist.

People are looking for something that, for the most part, does not exist. Whether it be the “full ride” Division 1 athletic scholarship, or the dream of the professional contract people are constantly being pushed, prodded and cajoled into believing that the “Holy Grail” is out there for their kid if they just spend enough money, get the right coaching, specialize, and most importantly, partner with their child in their pursuit of the PARENTS dream, not the children’s!

These kids change their minds all the time. They don’t know what they want long term, and they are not supposed to. They are kids, and the balance they need in their lives to be able to cope and learn in this increasingly fast paced and ever changing world is paramount to their long term success.

Appreciation Day for my good fortune

My book is dedicated to all my friends who have been with me over the last ten to twenty years. They allowed me to pick their brains and arrange access where needed, and encouraged me on this journey.

 It is also dedicated to the friends, families, children, and colleagues who I will never meet, but can certainly empathize with my cause, and who are looking for a better more satisfying way to enhance their lives through the youth sports journey.

THANK YOU: To everyone involved in this project. I would like to say thank you and give my heartfelt appreciation for all you have contributed to this endeavor. To mention all the people associated with this project would take up an entire new chapter in the book. I hope you know how much you contributed and how appreciative and thankful I am that you found time from your busy lives to help me and the children bring this to fruition.

There are three people who I would like to name. Kathleen Stanley has read and helped edit this book four times. My most important accomplishments in my life are directly related to her loyalty and trustworthiness. I feel way more strongly about her than this project. Words on a page do not seem enough to tell her I love her more now than the day I married her. She makes me a better person.

She gave me a wonderful son, Clayton, who has been instrumental in the writing of this book with suggestions and stories of his journey through youth sports.

She also gave me my daughter Molly. She is like having technical support 24/7 speaking in a language I understand, and fixing problem after problem with unbelievable patience for her father. Molly has edited the book, re-read it eight times, and then, when all seemed lost to me, right near the end, when I could not figure out how to upload this manuscript, she once again came through in the clutch. I really am blessed to be so fortunate to have a daughter who is gifted, thoughtful, and patient. I look at her with such pride and appreciation as to her journey in life, and I want to share with the world what she means to me. Thank you Molly

Their journey through youth sports was a key inspiration for writing this book and the video interviews I have done.

Thank you all. Peace. VJ

Survival of the Fittest

I was recently at a consulting job after my workshop was over a dad came up to me and said that he did not believe in equal play. He said that I was teaching kids that they did not have to work for something to have them given something for free. He said that was entitlement.

I responded quietly that I only believed in equal play for kids under the age of 13 or puberty. My reasoning was since only about 10% of the kids who were the best at 10 were still the best at 18 it seemed much more logical to have them concentrate on playing together as a group, and have the group get better as a whole. Wouldn’t that help each individual get better also?

He responded with, "Haven’t you heard of survival of the fittest?” Well, yes I have. The term survival of the fittest does not mean what you think it means. The first part, survival, means, in its original form and definition, survival of the species, not an individual of the species. The second part means  that the previous mentioned species, survives, but adapts to their ever changing environment, and therefore is the fittest.

He was not happy. He had his daughter next to him and said to me, “she wants to play one sport year round and that will make her more skilled, bigger, stronger and faster.

I looked at this young girl who was trying so hard not to be part of her father’s world and conversation, and smiled at her. I then asked her if she would like to try something different with her friends. She got a big grin and lit up like a Christmas tree. Then she looked at her father, and her whole being changed, body language and everything.  He looked at her, grabbed her hand and walked away.

Syracuse basketball and the Zen

I want to write about the Syracuse Orangemen’s loss to Dayton last night. This really is not about the loss, but the journey that led to the loss. Although he has won far more games than me at the college level, here it comes from me, a small time college hockey coach taking umbrage with the great hall of fame coach Jim Boeheim and his teaching and modeling of young men.

First I want to say that college coaching is 80% recruiting. I believe that if Lew Alcindor had not decided to travel 3,000 miles across the country to play at UCLA, we probably would not have heard of John Wooden, and that would have been a shame, as he taught and modeled way more than he coached.

Secondly, I want to write this blog because many high school and youth coaches see what these coaches do at the collegiate and pro level and try to emulate them, in all sports. The amount of problems it creates on and off the field, court, or rink, far outweighs and single victory or championship.

 I repeat the following mantra over and over everywhere I speak. There is no correlation to what Division 1 and Professional coaches do, how they do it, and why they do, to any high school and youth sports coach.

Now for the part that really explains what we are all about at Frozen Shorts. Back in the fall Syracuse traveled to Canada to play some meaningless games. As you know by now, I am not a believer in playing off season, or the new term, “non-traditional season” in your chosen sport. I believe, and we have the scientific data to back this up, that athletes perform better when they are given time off from their sport. Well, while watching one game, I noticed that they substituted very little, even when they were up a bunch.

Now I ask you why would anyone practice hard year round knowing they would not get a chance to play. The mantra that “they know their role is simply false.

They are athletes, they want to compete.

Now I am not saying that this practice was in any way invented by Syracuse or is exclusive to them. Gosh, it surely is not. But what I have seen, after watching well over 300 hundred youth and high school games, is that this practice is being imitated and repeated by these youth and high school coaches to the detriment of the players on the team. No one gets better sitting on the bench.

Of course the more you play one kid over another in a meaningless or important game, the better the one kid will get, and the less the other will want to play. You can argue that one kid doesn’t deserve to play for various reasons but since kids don’t develop full y until 23,24, 25, how do you know who is going to be the best unless you keep giving chances to all.

When you go buy a car don’t you go to a, lot with a lot of cars not just a few? Exclusion over inclusion is the new norm. There is a benefit to a few at the expanse of many and we talk to kids and parents every day who have bad experiences to tell us.

But my last comment is about the ZEN. After the Duke game the Syracuse coach joked about his on court antics. He had a chance to tell every youth and high school coach in the country that they shouldn’t do what he did, because they will never be in that situation. But he didn’t.  Im not saying that this was the only reason, but………..

What was their record after that?

Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton

A while back Bill Clinton said on national television: “it all depends on what your definition of is, is.” Fast forward to 2014 and I am now hearing “It all depends on what your definition of fun is.” A simple definition of fun is enjoyment or pleasure. Jeez, just about every kid in America knows what is fun and how to have fun. But what is behind this desire to redefine a word that most everyone uses on a weekly basis to describe an enjoyable activity?

The last two times I heard people question what the word fun means, they were both making money off of families by providing a service for children that was adult orientated. One was to get kids to go to a personal trainer, and the other was to promote a program that stresses structure. They wanted children to redefine fun so that they could provide a new service that describes fun as a goal orientated adult supervised activity.

 They now say because a child is doing an activity year round and they enjoy doing it, the fun they are having can have side effects that include, overuse injuries, fatigue, frustration, rehabilitation, and of course and end game financial result.

 In the never ending “ I must keep up with the other guy or fall behind” ( in a race that does not exist) people are being led down a path in youth and high school sports that is not supported by science, psychology, or data. The idea that you must play a sport year round to get good at it, must involve some kind of sacrifice, therefore to justify that new mantra fun must be redefined to fit that criteria.

 Fun has been and always will be to me, something that brings a smile to my face and fond memories later when recalled. When I watch children free play on a playground or just horsing around with their friends in a pickup game, I am struck by how free they are in their play. Without a coach or parent yelling at them they are having a great time.

 Children learn to share, they enjoy being active, and they learn and grow all on their own. They are having fun. The joy of having fun puts them in a place where they are free to try new things and not have to worry about getting yelled at if they fail or make a mistake. Just play on.

 There is no control and therefore a need for self importance by adults in what is supposed to be learning and growing experience of joy and pleasure for children.  Having fun and playing is an integral part of being a child. When you take it away, or try to redefine it for personal gain, there are consequences and we see these consequences every day a Frozen Shorts.

Maybe that is the real reason behind the desire to redefine a word that children and adults know so well. As an adult, if I dictate what fun is, I can then justify the control and entitlement issues without feeling guilty.