Starting the season off on the right foot

Camp gets players game-ready

Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2008

Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by MICHAEL REID Rising Northern senior Charles Junghans clears an obstacle at the Skipjack Soccer high school soccer prep camp held last week at Northern High. E-Mail This Article | Print This Story Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by MICHAEL REID Soccer players, from foreground, Lena Brauner, Hannah Smith and Hunter Albaugh take part in a ball-handling drill. Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by MICHAEL REID Northern graduate Hunter Albaugh maneuvers around some obstacles during a drill. Albaugh will play soccer this fall at Salisbury University.

And one of the ways they can better prepare themselves for the grind of the season is to be in perfect shape.

And the Skipjack Soccer high school prep camp, held last week at Northern High School, was a great place to start.

‘‘This is based on fitness, soccer specific fitness,” said camp organizer Jaime Webster, the assistant men’s soccer coach at St. Mary’s College. ‘‘We want to get them moving, because [Saturday] they start tryouts. Hopefully by getting out here and doing this we can kind of lessen that blow a little bit. We want the players to be ready when they get there, so they can show well in their tryouts and hopefully make their teams. And also the fitter they are going into tryouts, the less hopefully their coaches are going to have to work on fitness during preseason.”

The camp, which was open to incoming freshmen through seniors, had close to 50 high school players in attendance on a recent hot, humid evening.

All four Calvert County public high schools were represented as well as a few players from Southern High School in Anne Arundel County. Thirty-five players were from Northern High.

‘‘Those [Northern] kids are here, because they’ve seen over the years how productive it is,” said Webster of the camp, now in its eighth year.

Webster coached Northern’s varsity boys team from 2000 to 2003.

‘‘Every year they plan on coming, because they know it’s good for them,” Webster said.

‘‘I need to get into shape,” said Northern goalie Alex Wilson, who will enter his senior year this fall. ‘‘I ran a little bit over the summer, but for what we do in tryouts, you have to be in pretty good shape.”

Players said the reason they enrolled in the camp is to be prepared for grueling two-a-day tryouts and the long, hard season that follows.

‘‘During the summer you relax and start to slack off and I know if I go to this camp that they’ll make you work hard, they’ll make you get ready for the season,” said Hannah Smith, a rising senior at Patuxent High School and a starter on last year’s SMAC-winning varsity girls soccer team. ‘‘Mainly [I want to work on] my running and to get my endurance back up.”

‘‘I want to get a head start to the season, because I haven’t been doing much all summer,” said Thomas Adair, a rising Northern sophomore.

Adair played junior varsity last season, but hopes to crack the varsity lineup this fall.

‘‘I’ve gotten a bit out of shape, so I need this to get back into shape and it does help,” Adair said. ‘‘I work on my skills and everything because I need that, but I need fitness more.”

Lena Brauner attended her first fitness camp as a means of entering her senior season in peak form.

‘‘I want to prepare for the season because it’s my senior year, so I want to make it a good one,” she said during a short breather between drills. ‘‘We won SMAC last year, so we want to shoot higher this year.”

And she hopes to shoot higher thanks to a variety of drills. One featured a ball dribbling drill that involved backpedalling. Another had players jump over hurdles and crawl underneath barriers, all while controlling the ball.

‘‘We try to work on everything because just like in a soccer match, there’s going to be spurts where you have to work hard and run hard and times where you’re going to have to slow down and recover,” Webster said. ‘‘It’s different from running long distance where you keep the same pace all the way around. Soccer doesn’t work that way, so we also work on recovery. We’re basically trying to build it all because soccer’s not just purely an aerobic sport and it’s not an anaerobic sport.”

Brauner said the sport requires many things, but perhaps one of the most important is what she’s been working on in camp.

‘‘I feel like endurance is one of the most important things,” she said. ‘‘You have to be able to sprint and whatnot, but endurance is key. Last year, all we did [in tryouts] was running; we spent 45 minutes every day running. And I think that was one of the main things [to our success]. We could lose a game but we could never be beaten physically.”

Though the players were sweating and breathing heavily through various drills, they realized that today’s pain is perhaps tomorrow’s gain.

‘‘I have to admit, it sucks,” Smith said as she tried to recover from a particularly strenuous drill. ‘‘I’m hating it right now, but it’ll show [during the season].”