To be an athlete on one of UC’s many teams can be a fulfilling experience. The thrill of victory, the bonds formed, and the lessons learned have drawn many to playing a sport. However, to get ready to put in their maximum effort come gameday, the athletes at UC have to put in tremendous effort outside of their respective sports during intense training, turning blood, sweat, and tears into dunks, kicks, and cheers.
Coach Clyde Harris brought some insight into what UC’s Boys Basketball players go through to make their energetic plays. He stated, “What I found to be most effective for training athletes would have to be discipline; if they can be disciplined, they can do anything. Basketball involves a lot more running than any of the other sports. It’s easy to go from basketball to any sport, but it’s hard to go from sports like football to basketball because the cardio there is a lot different.”
“As far as the different aspects of training, it varies from position to position. You definitely want to separate the guards from the centers of power forwards, since their roles on the court differ in many ways. Regardless though, players usually dedicate about an hour to two hours to shot making a day, and train daily,” Harris stated.
Senior Captain Kimberly Ng talked about the training for the UC Girls Tennis Team. She said, “Tennis players usually train five days a week, during which we usually want to have a good balance of explosiveness and endurance. Tennis is a very endurance-based game where it’s not just physical but also mental. The most important thing is to be able to stay steady and last out the game.”
Ng said, “One of the hardest parts of training for tennis is trying to translate your training into games. Since it is more of an individual sport, it’s much harder mentally when you’re trying to play a game and you’re not performing at the same level as you do while you’re in training, which is often the case. You have to get over those barriers and just tap into your muscle memory in order to win a game.”
As for UC’s Football Team, Senior Captain Gunnar Reyes said, “We train both explosiveness and endurance but we generally prioritize endurance more because to be able to run and make contact with other people for all four quarters is something you need. The hardest part of training for football is just the conditioning. You have to grind through because once you get through that, the games feel a lot lighter and quicker.”
Reyes said, “Another thing in both practice and the games is the contact. No other sport has contact quite like us. We’re always colliding and our bodies are always sore. We really have to mentally prepare ourselves for the games and the pain that we endure.”
Junior Leif Andersen spoke about training for UC’s Varsity Wrestling Team. He said, “Our practices start with a few miles of running. After that, we’ll go straight into wrestling warm-ups. Then we’ll drill the technique for one and a half to two hours. Finally, we do about half an hour to forty minutes of live wrestling and conditioning.”
Andersen said, “The sport is definitely mentally tough. We have a saying that wrestling is 80 percent mental and 20 percent physical, and it’s true. You have to have a lot of heart and willpower to make it through the practices, the weight cuts, and especially the losses. As an individual sport, everything is on you, and it’s very humbling. Even the physical parts of wrestling are very much about mental strength. It’s not about whether you’re tired or hurting, because you will be. It’s about whether or not you have the mental strength to keep going even when everything else is telling you to stop.”
Senior Katrial Hernandez, who’s played for the UC Wrestling and Girls Badminton Teams as well as other sports such as softball for a League, spoke about her experiences with each sport. As for the focus required for each sport, Hernandez said, “It’s a bit hard to say which requires more because for wrestling, during training you really want to pay attention and learn the moves the right way, but I’d have to say badminton. Not only do you have to learn the moves and the footwork so that you don’t waste your energy, but you also have to use strategy. It’s kind of like chess. You have to think in advance when deciding which move you’re going to do and where you’re going to place the birdie. It requires a lot of strategic, fast thinking.”
Hernandez said, “With wrestling, I was definitely nervous at first because all of the other girls had been doing it a lot longer than me so they looked really buff and tough and seemed like they were mentally there and ready to get violent, so I started questioning ‘How do I sprawl [a defensive technique]? Wait, what’s the right takedown here? Being mentally tough is important for wrestling.”
Hernandez has learned important lessons from each sport. “Softball taught me teamwork and patience with others, because sometimes they’d get on my nerves; so I had to learn to be more considerate. Badminton taught me how to be good on my own as you had to rely on your own skill. Wrestling taught me mental and physical toughness, as I had to learn to push past what I thought were my limits, whether it be throwing up or being tired to death,” she said.
Sophomore Mia Sobotka shone a light on the particular complexities of training for cheer. “The hardest part about training for cheer is honestly not the physical part, but the sacrifices. I’ve personally made a lot of sacrifices for cheer and that was hard, but cheer is so fun and I can always say that one thing I enjoy about the practices is spending time with the people that are so awesome and so supportive,” said Sobotka.
She added, “I think explosiveness is really important because it makes us sharp and lets us look energized. Balance is definitely important, especially with stunts, because you’re throwing someone up in the air and that is dangerous, so balance is key.”
It takes a level of commitment and grit to be an athlete for UC High. Nevertheless, all of these athletes have found their own motivations to practice day after day, from love of the sport, to the taste of victory, and even the sense of community. Whether they be swinging a racket or pinning someone to the mat, it was sheer determination that brought them there, and it will be that very key attribute that will take them to victory.