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AN OLD-FASHIONED APPROACH TO ENHANCED PERFORMANCE: WORK HARDER
 Posted
4/7/2009 1:06:00 PM
Enhancing one’s performance is more a part of our culture than most of us realize.
We drink caffeine in the morning and take No-Doze at night in an effort to stay razor sharp regardless of the hour of the day.
Entertainers have been known to use recreational drugs to push their performances to extraordinary levels.
College students sometimes take prescription drugs to increase learning capacity and get better grades.
Athletes representing sports as diverse as Major League Baseball, the Tour de France, and the Olympics occasionally test positive for steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.
And we can’t turn on the television set without watching commercials for Viagra and Cialis.
Our culture is more stimulated than perhaps we’d like to think. High school athletics tend to mirror society. And so it is no surprise that people wonder what extremes today’s teenage athletes will take to enhance their performances.
Why are teenagers bigger, stronger, and more agile than they were a generation ago? Why is it that today’s high school students can swim faster, jump higher, bench press more, and hit the ball farther than anytime in American sports history?
The simple truth is this. Today’s high school athletes excel because they started playing their sport sooner, eat more sensibly, set higher goals for themselves, practice harder, have access to more sophisticated training facilities and coaching, and (in some cases) participate in their sport eleven or twelve months a year. While there may be rare, isolated exceptions, they do not use steroids.
In fact, high school drug testing programs in New Jersey, Florida and Texas, conducted during the last two years, tested 11,217 high school student-athletes for possible steroid use. They found only four positive tests, or a miniscule 0.035% of those tested. And Texas taxpayers spent $3,000,000 to find only two steroid users of 10,117 students tested. That’s not a very good return on investment, especially when state budgets are under so much duress (Note: only one student athlete in 600 in Florida and one in 500 in New Jersey tested positive).
Happily, the restraints that already are in place seem to be working. For example, there is a constant flow of information at the high school level about the perils of steroid use. Educational materials, conscientious coaches, medical doctors who conduct mandatory physical examinations and responsible parents help curb the use of steroids. More importantly, professional athletes who use performance enhancing drugs are panned, not praised, by the media and fans alike. So there is no honor associated with steroid use.
We adults might follow the example being set by our high school student athletes. While there is the occasional super athlete who is gifted talent wise, the vast majority excel because they work harder. They are committed to a high level of performance and rely on concentrated, repetitive practice and quality instruction rather than drugs, to achieve it.
If we all applied these same worthy principles to our respective jobs, there’s no telling how much we could stimulate our nation’s economy. And without spending an extra dime to do it!
Blake Ress is a former high school teacher, coach, referee, athletic director and principal. He currently is the Commissioner of the Indiana High School Athletic Association.
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Blake Ress
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Nice article - agreed. So many of our high school athletes work very hard on their sport or sports throughout the year. We also have some outstanding coaches who help student-athletes reach their full potential/
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Posted By
doug daugherty
On
5/18/2009 7:52:55 AM
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Bob Lovell / Coach's Corner
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Bob Lovell / Coach's Corner
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Bob Lovell / Coach's Corner
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Bob Lovell / Coach's Corner
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Bob Lovell / Coach's Corner
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