Coaches focus on conditioning to fight leg cramps
Proper training key after several players suffer leg cramps in opening week of season
Less is more sometimes, especially when it comes to the health of a soccer team.
Four seasons ago, Alvin Valdez would have ratcheted up the running and conditioning for the Santa Fe High girls soccer team in preparation for a daunting amount of matches to start the season. Experience, though, taught him that path was not always the best solution when facing an opening week in which the Demonettes played four matches in as many days. It started with the Aug. 22 match against St. Michael’s and concluded Saturday with a doubleheader at the Socorro Cup.
The stretch of matches came just after spending the first week of practice — which began Aug. 13 — in tryouts before practicing for two days before playing the Lady Horsemen to a 1-all tie.
“Now, I see the pitfalls of trying to get their physical endurance up, what it does to the body,” Valdez said. “Now, it’s not as high a priority. We have active rest days and we do game sessions so that when they leave the field, they leave healthy, as well.”
The New Mexico Activities Association compressed the amount of practice for fall sports programs, mainly to help alleviate the crossover from fall to winter sports and give the sports in the next season more practice with full teams. For soccer, it meant some teams had just a week of practices — if not less — to prepare for the start of the season. In Northern New Mexico, the boys and girls programs for St. Michael’s, Santa Fe High, Capital and Santa Fe Prep started their season last week. A common theme in some of these opening matches was some players cramping up in the second half
of matches due to lack of conditioning. In the Lady HorsemenDemonettes match, a half-dozen players left the field with leg cramps.
Valdez said conditioning played a bit of a role in that, more so with players who did not participate in summer workouts or play on summer club teams. Add to that a temperature in the high 70s on a turf field that adds a several degrees, plus a match that went two overtimes, and it was a recipe for muscles tightening up.
“You’re on a large field for 80 minutes, then you add two 10-minute overtimes, and you do see that, the fatigue,” Valdez said. “But the more you prepare into the season, the more likely you are to succeed [in avoiding cramps and early season injuries].”
The day after that match, though, Santa Fe Prep’s boys team had three players limp off the field because of cramps in a 2-1 loss to Capital during warm weather. On the flip side, the Prep girls didn’t have the same issues despite a 2-1 overtime win over Capital. Their match started at 6 p.m. and finished under the lights as temperatures cooled.
Blue Griffins head coach Steph Coppola said she didn’t substitute merely to keep players fresh, and the ragged style of play — neither side possessed the ball for significant periods of time — contributed to a slower pace.
“I was hoping that we would connect and get some combinations and create some kind of a rhythm, but we didn’t,” Coppola said. “Everyone got playing time, but I would have liked to have managed it a bit more than I did.”
Still, Coppola said her philosophy of preseason and early season training has evolved. No longer is she running her players to improve conditioning while also working on ball skills and scrimmaging. She is promoting a different way to condition in the opening month.
“If you do a lot of running and try to get everybody as fit as possible, it just wears down legs and leads to injuries,” Coppola said. “We do a lot of on-ball conditioning, and I feel once we get three or four [matches] under our belt and we get a break [in early September], we’ll work pretty hard on some fitness.”
Determining how to handle the first weeks of the soccer season comes down to the organized summer workouts that usually help with conditioning and skill work. It also leads into preseason practice and how many players are competing at the club level. St. Michael’s head boys coach Mike Feldewert said he conducts summer workouts in late June and and early July to get his players ready. He added that a lot of the Horsemen also compete with club teams, so he is less concerned about their conditioning.
“I don’t think conditioning has been a problem for us,” Feldewert said. “From my perspective, when you have kids who want to come out and do the workouts in the summer, that’s why we do it. I don’t really have any complaints there.”
What coaches are more concerned about is how their players take care of themselves in between matches. Feldewert, Coppola and Valdez each emphasize a good diet and stretching properly before and after practices and before matches. “As a coach, you got to give them that 10 to 15 minutes at the end of practice to do those deeper stretches that over time will keep their muscles from contracting and hurting themselves,” Feldewert said.
The injury factor becomes greater when the schedule becomes more hectic. Valdez said he lost a midfielder to injury on the second day of the Socorro Cup. The St. Michael’s boys couldn’t get their evening match against Santa Fe High finished on the same day the girls played because of a thunderstorm, so the match was rescheduled for Wednesday. That gives the Horsemen five matches in a sixday stretch, with three coming at Taos’ Sangre de Cristo Classic on Friday and Saturday.
Feldewert will employ a similar strategy as Valdez — lessen the intensity of Thursday’s practice to save legs for the weekend.
“We’re certainly going to be working on our conditioning this week, with [matches] on Wednesday and three in two days,” Feldewert said. “The trick is going to be how we do our bodies right and eat appropriately to handle this stretch.”