SportsLetter

SL Interview: Karen Ronney and her Proud Parents Guide

Karen Ronney is the proud parent of three athletic girls.  She's also the author of a new book titled "Proud Parents' Guide to Raising Athletic, Balanced, and Coordinated Kids" (Thomas Nelson / Amazon).  The book aims to educate parents (as well as grandparents and educators) about how to take responsibility for creating coordinated, healthy and active children.

Ronney is a former competitive tennis player who now coaches youth tennis and other sports.  She is one of 24 finalists for the Double-Goal Coach award from Positive Coaching Alliance.  In the book, she uses her personal and coaching experiences and journalism background to craft this hands-on guide.  The first half of the book details how children progress, biologically and neurologically, from birth to age six, and explains why it's so important to engage children in physical fitness activities at an early age.  Such intervention is vital, Ronney writes, if only to counter the dual trends of youth obesity and the elimination of physical education classes in many schools.
 
The second half of the book offers age-appropriate games for parents to use to help their youngsters develop motor skills and coordination.  Ronney notes that the 200 easy-to-use activities, designed for the first six years of a child's life, do not require expensive equipment.  And, she emphasizes, even the hardest-working parents can carve ten minutes from their busy schedules to play with their children.  This type of interaction works wonders, Ronney says, because exercise jumpstarts developmental skills and promotes a lifetime of good fitness habits.

"The 'Proud Parents' Guide' is not about raising a super-athlete," Ronney writes.  "It's about raising a healthy kid with good skills and coordination, one who considers physical activity an essential and enjoyable part of daily life."

SportsLetter interviewed Ronney by telephone from her home in the San Diego area.
--David Davis

Fact check

The Tour of California ended Sunday February 22 in Escondido, capping a spectacular nine-day event, as Levi Leipheimer supported by teammate Lance Armstrong won his third consecutive tour.  Drawn in part by Armstrong’s participation, an estimated 2 million spectators lined California roads and highways to watch the fourth edition of the race. 

Not content with stating that the 2009 event had set a Tour of California record for attendance, the tour broadcaster, Versus, announced not once but twice that the 2 million spectators made the 2009 tour the largest sports event in California history.  Don’t believe it.  It’s not even close to being true.  The 1984 Olympic Games sold and distributed about 5.5 million tickets for events in California.  In addition, the California Highway Patrol estimated that 275,000 non-ticket holding spectators watched the 1984 road cycling events in Orange County, and approximately 310,000 fans watched the men’s and women’s marathons from the roadside.  So, even without counting the Olympic torch relay spectators, the 1984 Olympic Games was three times as big as the 2009 Tour of California, and the vast majority of Olympic spectators, unlike tour spectators, paid for their tickets.

Ticket sales in 1984 were just one of the revenue sources that enabled Olympic organizers to realize a $232.5 million surplus.  Sixty percent of the surplus was directed to the United State Olympic Committee; the other 40 percent was used to establish the LA84 Foundation, which has invested more than $177 million in youth sports in Southern California.  

California high school sports participation

The California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) will crown champions in three sports next month.  State champions will be determined in wrestling, and boys and girls basketball.  Boys and girls soccer competition will conclude with regional champions.  According to the 2006-07 CIF Participation survey, those three sports combined -- boys and girls -- occupied over one-quarter (26%) of the 735,503 kids who play interscholastic sports in California.

The boys sport with the most participants was, not surprisingly, football (11-player) with 107,916 athletes.  For girls, it was the other football (i.e. soccer), which saw 40,895 athletes hitting the pitch.  Any guesses out there what the second-most popular sport was for boys and girls?  Try track and field for both, which saw 49,911 boys and 38,817 girls participate.

And the fastest growing sport for both genders?  Lacrosse, which saw a 47.5% increase for boys and 38% for girls.

For a table of the top 10 boys and girls sports click here:  http://www.cifstate.org/about/participation/partsurvey07.pdf

Look for a new participation survey from the CIF some time this summer.

Knee injuries in adolescents

ACL.  MCL.  Meniscus.  Initials and words that are as much a part of the sports pages as RBI, PAT and REB.  And of late, as much a part of youth sports as hair foo-foos, post-game tunnels and snacks.

According to an article published by the Cleveland Clinic, "in the human engaged in high-velocity, cutting, twisting, and jumping activities, the knee is the weakest link. In the United States each year, approximately 50 million young athletes participate in interscholastic or extracurricular sports. Each year, some 775,000 adolescent athletes are treated in emergency departments. Fifteen percent of these injuries involve the knee." 

Interestingly, the article also states that "the adolescent's knee is different from the younger child's, the older teenager's or the adult's. It has very active growth plates, or physes, where bone growth occurs ... The growth plates in adolescents are mechanically weaker than the surrounding bones and are often weaker than the ligaments that hold the knee joint together. (Ligaments are bands of tough, flexible tissue that support bones around the joint.) As a result, some injuries that would cause a ligament tear in an adult or older teenager will instead cause a fracture through this relatively weak area of growth plate."

Your knee, courtesy of the the UC San Diego School of Medicine.

Publish or Perish

ACL Injuries and the Tale of the Tape

Video Analysis of Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury: Abnormalities in Hip and Ankle Kinematics.  Barry P. Boden, Joseph S. Torg, Sarah B. Knowles and Timothy E. Hewett.  The American Journal of Sports Medicine, 37 (2) 2009

In spite of the growing mountain of reports and analyses concerning ACL injuries, the researchers in this study felt that "the mechanisms of noncontact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury have not been clearly defined."  Researchers were most interested in foot position and lower extremity joint angles of athletes at the time of ACL injury.  They hypothesized that "compared with uninjured athletes performing comparable athletic maneuvers (controls), athletes with ACL injury (subjects) would show a more flatfooted profile and a more flexed hip at landing after a jump or after a sharp deceleration maneuver."

They reviewed videotapes of ACL injuries to athletes, gathered over a 12-year period (1995-2007) from the NBA and WNBA, physicians, athletic trainers and patients.  Of the 70 videotapes considered, 29 videos were analyzed.  Researchers chose videos that showed non-contact ACL injuries to athletes (defined as minimal contact with other athletes, no direct contact with the knee, no tackling or shoving by an opponent) as well as clear footage of the athlete's foot contacting the ground.  Sports represented in the tapes were a mixture of professional, college and high school sports including basketball, handball, soccer, football, competitive cheerleading and gymnastics.  These 29 "subject/injury" videos were then compared with a "control" group of 27 videos showing professional and collegiate basketball players "performing similar decelerating or landing maneuvers during game situations." 

Researchers studied video of jumping athletes as their feet made contact with the ground after a jump and noticed that the forefeet of the control group athletes contacted the ground first, while athletes of the injury group had "first ground contact with the hindfoot or entirely flatfooted, attained the flatfoot position significantly sooner, had significantly less planter-flexed ankle angles at initial contact, and had a significant larger mean hip flexion angle."  Researchers concluded that jumping athletes who touch down flatfooted or with the hindfoot may have a higher risk of ACL injury.

LOI out loud

Lost in all of the melodrama and artificial angst of college football's National Letter of Intent signing day was the fact that February 4 also was the initial signing date for other NCAA sports.  Like their football classmates, many high school athletes from the sports of field hockey, soccer, track and field, cross country, and men's water polo gathered friends and family around them, committed to a college, and fired off their Letters of Intent (LOI). 

Dyestat broke down the track and field and cross country signings on a school-by-school basis.  Oregon's signing of track phenom Jordan Hasay, who delighted crowds at Hayward Field when she ran in last summer's Olympic Trials, seems to have been the coup of the day.  

Increasingly, private clubs are playing a role in the development of high school athletes.  Nowhere was this more evident than in the list of incoming men's college soccer players.

Impact of PEDs on track and field

Doug Logan, the CEO of USA Track & Field, doesn’t come from the low-profile school of sports administration.  Logan, who made headlines last year when he wrote to President Bush urging him not to pardon former track star Marion Jones, has written a strongly worded piece on the impact of performance enhancing drugs on track and field and the role the supplement industry plays.  He says, “Performance-Enhancing Drugs are threatening to choke the life out of the sport that I serve and love. And in many ways, the supplement industry has been assisting in braiding the noose.”  Logan blames unregulated substances containing traces of banned and/or dangerous substances for positive tests and even deaths. He goes on to blame “powerful Inside-the-Beltway friends such as Senator Orin Hatch.” If you coach kids who rely on supplements, this is worth reading.

Recruiting advisors for HS football players

The New York Times consistently provides excellent coverage of the transition from high school athlete to college athlete.  In today’s edition reporters Thayer Evans and Pete Thamel tell the story of high school tailback Bryce Brown and his relationship to Brian Butler, described as “among a new breed of entrepreneurs inserting themselves into college football recruiting.  Some say he is navigating gray areas of N.C.A.A. rules and brokering his clients’ futures for personal gain. Others say he is providing his clients with exposure they would not normally receive by leveraging connections he has made during the recruitment of the Brown brothers to create a market for lesser players.”

Michael Phelps and The Children

With the Super Bowl completed, sportswriters have had time to turn their attention to the Michael Phelps story.  Commentary and framing of the story has run the gamut from “It’s not a big deal” (Tanku Varadarajan and Sally Jenkins) to “It is a big deal and he should be punished” (Michael Wilbon) to “He’s getting off easy ’cuz he’s white” (Dave Hyde).  Predictably, a number of writers and sources have alluded to the impact of the bong episode on “young people,” and more specifically young swimmers, their parents and their coaches.

Jo-Ann Barnas of the Detroit Free Press lamented without quoting any source, “Parents of school-age swimmers know they must have yet another heart-to-heart with their children.”  Newsday ran the headline: “Michael Phelps bong photo gives chance to talk about drugs, LI coaches say,” but despite the plural reference quoted only a single coach who opined, "It’s upsetting on so many levels … It's something that he has to live with, and we have to live with as coaches and parents."  Hal Habib of the Palm Beach Post quoted two youth coaches, one of whom had already discussed the incident with his swimmers.  Gordon Andrews, who coaches high school and U-18 swimmers, told Habib, “One of my swimmers said, 'I don't see it as any big deal, especially after what he accomplished' … Some of the other swimmers I talked to felt his judgment was bad.”  Andrews added that the most serious effect could be on U-12 swimmers, "because they sometimes see our athletes, especially someone like Phelps, as almost god-like and can do no wrong, whereas the older, teenage kids see it as bad judgment and let's get over it."  A second high school coach quoted by Habib predicted, "My first gut reaction would be it would make him look more human in the eyes of the kids.  They would probably be quicker to forgive than adults will.  They don't see marijuana as being an illegal drug, a lot of them.  They think it's more like a social drug, like alcohol."