SteveDanley
Sophomore
Posts: 102
Age: 39
Reg: 02-25-12
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02-13-18 05:40 PM - Post#247744
In response to Jeff2sf
Asia's post is the reason I'm not interested in Steve's perspective (just this one time!). Humans/players whoever overestimate things like this all the time.
You guys set me up!
A couple of thoughts:
In my experience, college practices are typically much more grinding than games. So it's rarely the actual play that is the killer in the 5 in 8 days situation, especially because coaches wind down the practices.
The travel is really difficult -- especially that 7 1/2 hour bus trip to Dartmouth. I still have nightmares about every different position in the bus across seats. Large people, small bus. Not great. At any given point in the season, it wasn't uncommon for us to have 1/3 to 1/2 the team getting treatment for back tightness or other related issues.
The sleep thing is hard too. If you're playing, games end at 9 and you haven't eaten. Then you get straight on the bus with some food. By the time you check into the new hotel, calm down, get more food, it's often 1 or 2. Coaches typically compound the problem through the belief that it's best for players to "get moving" early the next day, so you're up for mandatory breakfast, then shootaround, then an hour or two nap, then pre-game meal, then to the court to loosen up. It's a tough stretch.
I find the 1 point research somewhat believable -- this several games in several days effect interacts with all kinds of other physical maintenance issues (I think travel is baked into home-away dynamic already, and that coaches regularly burn out their players legs in season anyway). Almost everyone I played with felt like the grind of the season took a fair bit off their athleticism -- so any effect is on the margin, and players play at 85% a lot anyway.
The tougher thing for me was school -- once I started playing regular minutes, I essentially stopped being able to do school work on game days. I was just too fired up. That means you come back from a stretch like 5 in 8 days, and you want to sleep for a week, you've just logged god knows how many bus hours, and you're easily 500 pages and a paper or two behind in school. If you dropped a game towards the end of the stretch, it gets worse because the practices get harder and longer (Dunph's rule was no Tuesday practice when we were in 1st place in the league -- that day off was heaven). But otherwise, you sleep all day Sunday, then back to the grind Monday morning with a lift, classes, and a long practice.
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