Competition is year-round for modern athlete

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By Eric Page | Monday, June 30, 2008 10:45 PM CDT | () comments

There was a time, not all that long ago, when high school athletics were defined by seasons.

Football and volleyball in the fall, basketball and wrestling in the winter, baseball, softball and track and field in the spring.

And the summer, well, the summer was for lounging by the pool or playing at the park, playing the games you loved, recreationally, at your leisure, with your friends.

No more.

Interviews with area high school coaches from sanctioned sports in Iowa and Illinois revealed that in almost every sport — basketball to baseball, softball to swimming — there are opportunities for athletes not just to participate, but to play at a highly competitive level 10 to 12 months out of the year.

In the past 10 to 15 years, the offseason has been washed away as acronyms such as AAU, ASA, AJGA and USAV have rolled like flood waters over the landscape of high school sports.

“The number of participants has just escalated so much,” Bettendorf golf coach Tina Johnson said. “There are so many more kids who have a chance to compete. There are so many kids who compete on a state and national level.”

No one seems to know how or when it started. It’s one of those things that evolved over time, almost unnoticed. One summer tournament led to another, one club team led to two and two led to four, and, pretty soon, offseason participation had graduated from minimal to mandatory, something athletes had to do in order to keep up.

“In order to compete at the highest level, you’ve got to spend more time. If the experience isn’t there, it’s going to be awful tough to compete against that experience and win,” said Moline volleyball coach Tim Albrecht. “The opportunities are there. It’s just up to the kids to take advantage of them. I think it’s great for the kids who love the sport who want to experience it on a year-round basis.”

Plenty of opportunities

A basketball player who plays with his or her school team during the winter can go right into AAU ball when the season ends in March. That, along with camps and leagues, will carry said athlete through August. And there are fall leagues that run from August through the beginning of the school season in November.

That basketball player — boy or girl — could play as many as 100 organized games in a year, twice the opportunity that was there a decade ago.

“In the mid ’90s, it really started to become more state-, even nation-wide,” Davenport Central boys basketball coach Craig Wurdinger said. “It was a time when the talent was really starting to surface more, and kids were getting more opportunities. The opportunities are unlimited now. There are so many teams and opportunities for them.”

Ten years ago, a select group of elite players in Iowa played AAU. There was only one program in the state then — Martin Bros., which Hank Huddleson started in 1991. Now, there are a half-dozen that provide opportunities to hundreds. This past year, five players off Wurdinger’s Class 4A state runner-up played a full slate of AAU games in the offseason. Dozens of others from Quad-Cities schools did the same.

Nonstop schedule

The same growth has been seen in softball, where Illnois players go straight from a 30- to 40-game schedule in the spring into a 50-plus-game ASA season in the summer. Baseball players do the same with American Legion teams.

In Iowa, where the softball season runs from May into July, some players will suit up with both high school and ASA teams. Then there are leagues in the fall and indoor leagues in the winter at the OS Sports Complex.

In Illinois, said Moline softball coach Mark Gerlach, it used to be that ASA was big only in Chicago, Peoria and the Quad-Cities.

“Now,” he said, “ASA is everywhere. And it affects the high school season, because everyone is getting better.”

That’s an effect coaches are seeing in all sports — with increased opportunities to play and improve, the level of play in high school has shot through the roof. Partly because athletes are starting to specialize at a younger age.

ASA and AAU start them young, sometimes as early as 7 or 8. And there are programs in other sports that do the same, carrying the specialized instruction all the way through high school.

No offseason

That kind of intense practice and the increased exposure that comes with increased participation has led to more post-high school opportunities for athletes from the area. A decade ago those athletes might not have gotten the chance, said Jamie Johnson, founder of the Iowa Barnstormers AAU basketball program based in Iowa City.

“If you find a kid early and get him involved in a program like ours, that player is more apt to put time into basketball instead of maybe drifting off to football or baseball. He might still play those things, but he’s devoting his time to hone his basketball skills,” Johnson said. “You’re going to see more of those guys reach their full potential. Whereas maybe 10 years ago, you saw those guys bounce around from sport to sport and never end up playing in college in any of them.”

The Mississippi Valley Track Club, which has members ranging from 7 to 18, holds practice five nights a week at Pleasant Valley High School and draws athletes from all over the Quad-Cities. There are opportunities to compete at meets on the local, regional and national level every weekend throughout the summer. That takes many of the more than 100 participants from the spring track season into cross country in the fall.

Soccer, swimming, wrestling, golf and volleyball all are pretty much the same — an athlete can find competition locally, regionally or nationally all throughout the traditional offseason, any time of year.

There is no offseason any more.

Eric Page can be contacted at (563) 383-2277 or epage@qctimes.com.