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Under a nonstop watch

In the final analysis, goal-oriented athletes employing more high-tech supervision

Clay Latimer, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 19, 2005 at midnight

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LOS GATOS, Calif. - Jamie Carey is ready. Sitting in a conference room in a Silicon Valley health club, the 24-year-old professional basketball player is staring at a computer screen, awaiting the results of a new, unusual test designed to calculate her athletic potential.

For the past 90 minutes, a sports trainer, toting a hand-held computer that registers results as they occur, has led Carey, a former Thornton resident and Horizon High School standout, through a maze of 30 tests.

He began by measuring her muscle girth, bone size, skin folds, the length of her limbs and her height and weight. Then he checked her grip strength with a hydraulic device and her concentration with a visual memory quiz. He calculated her balance with a wobble board and her reflexes with a yardstick dropped between her thumb and index finger. He analyzed her foot speed with a floor ladder and her agility with a one-turn run.

Now, minutes after the final test, the results are popping up on the computer screen, revealing themselves in bright charts, squiggly lines and bell curves.

According to Sports Potential Inc., Carey, one of the best female basketball players to come from Colorado, is best suited to play . . . Soccer.

Huh?

"Actually," Carey said after taking in the results, "if basketball had been the highest, I would have been skeptical, because I know I'm not a typical basketball player. Coming out here, I told my mom that I thought I'd be first in soccer.

"My mom said: 'Well, you're just going to have to change careers then.' "

Carey has worked too long and hard to even dream about dumping basketball, but she's smart enough to realize that the Sports Potential test, which costs $250, had picked up the subtleties of her game and body and might provide additional insights down the line.

"You always look for an edge," said the former University of Texas point guard who plays for the Connecticut Sun of the WNBA and and the Colorado Chill of the National Women's Basketball League.

Getting an edge

In America's frenetic youth sports culture, getting an edge has become a chronic preoccupation, spawning a $4.1 billion-per-year supplemental industry of private coaches, personal trainers, private training facilities, clinics, camps and cutting-edge companies like Sports Potential.

Until recently, private instructors were the domain of Olympic and country club sports such as gymnastics, golf and tennis. But today, athletes in team sports routinely turn to tutors in the never-ending quest for scholarships, professional glory and personal fulfillment.

In fact, opportunities for all types of self-improvement are as limitless as a child's work ethic and his or her parents' bank account.

Coaches and clinics exist for goalies and quarterbacks, soccer players and jump shooters, wrestlers and volleyball players. Young athletes can choose between day camps and overnight camps, instructional camps and fitness camps. They can receive specialized one-on-one instruction from former professional and college athletes, sports psychologists and strength coaches. They even can attend year-round schools - sports academies such as the Roddick/Moros International Tennis Academy, as well as IMG Academies - for total-immersion instruction.

To meet the growing demand, high-tech training facilities are popping up like Home Depots in suburbs across the country.

In Centennial, for example, dozens of young athletes gather every day in the Velocity Sports Performance center, a 20,000-square-foot facility with an artificial-turf field, half-court basketball floor, a sprint track with electronic timers, as well as plenty of free weights and training gear.

Instead of focusing on sports-specific skills - catching a football, launching a hook shot - teens and preteens work on the finer points of ankle rotation and body-weight distribution and other arcane skills designed to improve agility, strength, quickness, power and speed - the staples for all sports.

The drills, technology and coaching staff are pro quality, which is why old pros such as Gus Frerotte, Ed McCaffrey and Bill Romanowski frequently work out at Velocity, side-by-side with the children down the street.

"This place is like heaven for kids," former Colorado Rockies player Terry Shumpert said.

More analysis on the way

But in an age when age virtually is inconsequential in sports, the quest for enlightenment hardly ends with sixth-graders. Sports Potential soon will unveil a test that it says will show if a child is prepared for a particular sport. For example, if a youngster doesn't understand the concept of sequential motion, forget about diving for a while.

An Australian biotech company, Genetic Technologies, is selling what it calls the first DNA test for sports performance. Available online in kit form for about $100, the test uses a DNA sample taken from a mouth swab to detect variations of a gene known as ACTN3, which can identify whether a baby has the genetic makeup to excel in sprint and power sports or endurance events. Although it doesn't measure all the factors that go into determining potential for all types of athletic performance - and most of the genetic contributors to athletic performance still await discovery - the test is based on science gained from the Human Genome Project and could be a prelude to a remarkable revolution.

"It is never too early to give your kid a leg up," child psychiatrist Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, co-author of The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap, said sarcastically.

Nothing seems too far-fetched in America, where young athletes often set the agenda for entire families - from mealtime to vacation time to the allocation of crucial resources, like money.

Jay Coakley, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, conducted a survey of North American families that participated in a 2001 junior ice hockey tournament at the Air Force Academy.

"They were spending from $5,000 to $20,000 a year on one kid," he said. "It's typical to spend $8,000 on a travel soccer team; it's hard to get by for under $3,000 to $4,000."

Zach Zimmerman, of Broomfield, a 15-year-old basketball player, started working with a personal trainer in eighth grade and with a private coach in ninth. In August, he enrolled at IMG Academies in Bradenton, Fla., where he focuses on basketball and conditioning five hours a day. Coaches, personal trainers and a "mental conditioning" coach are available to him throughout the academic year.

"There's no way you're going to be able to keep up unless you put in the extra time and work - not unless you're Carmelo Anthony or Michael Jordan. And they put in extra time and work," Zimmerman said.

In Vermont, Andy Newell, a member of the U.S. cross-country ski team, racked up 2,500 hours of training in high school under the watchful eyes of coaches who monitored everything from his diet to his technique.

"A lot of people say kids shouldn't be focused on cross-country skiing that young," he said. "I could definitely see that it makes your life too narrow. But unfortunately, if you want to be one of the best skiers in the world, it's what you have to do."

But some of the best athletes still need basic training.

"People put (children) in a sport at 5, 6 and 7, so basically we have people who are very good players but not good athletes," said David Donatucci, an instructor at the International Performance Institute, a unique training center at IMG that focuses on enhancing athletic performance. "You have golfers who can't throw a baseball, basketball players who can't swing a baseball bat, tennis players who can't kick a ball. The basic skills are neglected at an early age."

IMG and Velocity instructors teach techniques that children in previous generations learned on the playground - skipping, hopping and other rudiments that provide the foundation for all athletic movement.

Seasonal sports in old days

In the old days, a boy played baseball when it was hot outside, football when the leaves started falling and basketball during icy winters.

Private coaches were almost unheard of in team sports before the era of specialization, but athletes possessed all the necessary moves.

John McEnroe and Jack Nicklaus played three sports in high school. Denver Broncos offensive coordinator Gary Kubiak made three all-state teams in Texas.

Shumpert was a three-sport high school letter winner in Kentucky, but he's hardly nostalgic for the '80s; not after watching his children work out at Velocity.

"I call it major-league training, because it's how I trained in the major leagues, only they're getting it now," he said. "If I'd gotten this kind of training when I was young . . . I mean, I didn't have my first private instructor until after my third year of pro ball. I told the guy: 'Teach me like I was a high school kid.' I went back to basics.

"I see the kids coming out of the amateur baseball draft. I see LeBron James making the jump from high school to the NBA. I know these young kids are better than we were, because of the instruction and coaching they get at a young age."

Shumpert employs basketball and football tutors for his son - he covers baseball himself - and another basketball tutor for his daughter. The children also attend summer basketball camps and join their father at Velocity.

"My biggest incentive in baseball happened when I was 13 and I went to a baseball camp and Tommy Herr (then a St. Louis Cardinals infielder) was there," he said. "Just being in the same gymnasium, getting to shake his hand, that made me want to be a pro player.

"Now, my kids work out side-by-side by (pros). If I would have had a chance to have a major-league player offer me lessons, my mom would have gone broke to fit it in. Knowing how I was as a kid, I would have broken my neck to be around them. But the chance just didn't exist."

A while back, Shumpert received some belated advice about his running stride from a Velocity instructor.

"I did a lot of things wrong. I tried to make adjustments, but the bad habits were ingrained in me," he said.

Poor families falling behind

For many children, personal instruction is little more than a dream, a fact that increasingly concerns community leaders.

"They bust their butt at (inner-city schools) and once in a while put together good teams," said Bob Ottewill, former Colorado High School Activities Association commissioner. "But mostly, they get kicked; they have no chance. It's totally a case of haves and have-nots. You can almost name the sport. Even volleyball and basketball. These are inner-city games, but it's the well-heeled suburban schools who have the best teams. They play 80 games a year, so they're bound to play well."

But love of a sport still matters, said Steven Spinner, president and CEO of Sports Potential. As a child, he said, he was ill-suited for team sports but found an outlet when a track coach suggested he try distance running. In 2002, he founded SPI with the idea of matching children and adults to the sports that best suit them. Working with national governing bodies, Stanford biostatisticians and sports psychologists, SPI developed psychological and physical tests designed to find the kind of natural fit that playground basketball players intuitively discover.

"In pickup games, you see good players and imitate them. Sometimes you get in over your head, but you learn and adapt," Coakley said. "You learn a love of the experience. Those are the things I think you have to have in order to excel in young adulthood.

"As far as I can tell, at some of the programs at IMG and Velocity, (young athletes) are learning the technical aspects of a particular sport but not necessarily the love.

"If you're going to stick it out, if you're eventually going to claim a sport as part of you, it has to come in a voluntary way, not in a desperate way or by default mode."

Love matters

No one ever questioned Carey's passion for basketball. At Stanford, she was named Pacific-10 Conference freshman of the year for the 1999-2000 season, earning a reputation as a fearless player who would dive for a loose ball. But Carey's aggressiveness forced her to the sideline when she suffered a concussion during her sophomore year.

Post-concussive symptoms forced her to give up basketball, and she transferred to Texas, hoping for another opportunity. When she was cleared to play after sitting out two seasons, she helped lead the Longhorns to the 2003 Final Four and earned Academic All-American honors, two Big 12 Conference All-Academic awards and two nominations for National Player of the Year before continuing her unlikely career with the Sun and the Chill.

"I'm tiny for a point guard," she said. "People will believe I'm a soccer player before they believe I'm a basketball player. But I didn't love soccer. And I didn't love softball before I quit, even though I was better in softball than basketball at the time.

"I loved basketball."

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