WOODBURY— Many Nonnewaug spring athletes had different experiences when it came to preseason conditioning.
For senior boys tennis captain Matt Shupenis, playing basketball in the winter helped make spring conditioning easier.
“During basketball season, we take conditioning pretty seriously,” Shupenis said. “We’re doing a lot of sprints and kinda short movements, and short, explosive exercises, so I think that really translates over to tennis having to be able to move quickly and laterally.”
Playing a winter sport helped Shupenis prepare, but what if spring athletes don’t play a winter sport?
Junior outdoor track athlete Hailey Goldman, who didn’t play a sport this past winter, is now experiencing some difficulties as the spring season begins.
“I mean, we’re already like a week in and it has pretty much sucked,” Goldman said. “I was mostly working all winter, and I didn’t really have the energy to go for runs. I really am regretting it now, and I just know it’s gonna take a little more time for me to hit my PRs and do things that I wanted to do earlier because I’m just not in shape for it. I don’t have the conditioning to be that fast yet.”
Although Goldman regrets not playing a sport in the winter, senior baseball captain R.J. Barksdale thinks not playing a winter sport was more beneficial for him.
“It helps me recover after football, and that’s kind of the main reason why I stopped doing a winter sport,” said Barksdale, who wrestled as a freshman. “I needed a break right after football so it really did help. It doesn’t make it worse for conditioning, as long as you’re doing something throughout the winter.”
Even though Barksdale didn’t play sports in the winter, having an offseason helped him to be more prepared for baseball. Nonnewaug baseball coach Kyle Brennan thinks that the offseason is where athletes maintain their conditioning.
“Your offseason conditioning gives you your starting place,” Brennan said. “We don’t have as much time during the course of the season to maintain conditioning — we have to be focused on baseball skills and playing games — so the better you are in shape to enter the season, the better you’ll be.”
Brennan advises his players that being conditioned before the season starts is going to benefit them during the season. Boys tennis coach Nick Sheikh agrees that not being conditioned is going to affect the start of athletes’ season.
“Conditioning sets the foundation of everything else,” Sheikh said. “If you’re not conditioned when you come in, you’re playing catch-up, and if you wanna compete with the best, you can’t be playing catch up the whole time, so those who aren’t ready to go or are new to it have to start with baby steps and lay that proper foundation. If you do miss a lot of those fundamentals early on, that’s when a lot of those bad habits can set in, especially with a sport like tennis where it’s very technical.”
Despite Sheikh’s words of wisdom, many athletes comes into the season starting from square one.
Nonnewaug boys track and field coach Deborah Flaherty combats this by training her new unconditioned kids at a slower pace, building them up throughout the season.
“I know the kids that run indoor track and that have been continuing to run, so they’re gonna be obviously better conditioned than a kid that’s new,” Flaherty said. “When it’s a track workout, if I put a new kid at an upper-level workout, they’re gonna get shin splints, they’re going to give up, they’re going to get really sore, and then that soreness is going to get difficult for them to proceed through the next week or so.”
Nonnewaug senior track captain Ellie McDonald is excited about what this outdoor season is going to bring.
“I am so excited to see the progress that will be made following how much we succeeded in indoor. So many more people do outdoor, which brings lots of fun and more competition,” McDonald said. “I am looking forward to seeing how well our team and myself do this season.”
