Today at ELITEAM…
Was a triumphant day for the boys dorm! They won the bed-making competition and kept themselves in the game. They need a repeat win tomorrow to force a tie-breaker on Saturday. The addition of “hospital corners” made all the difference.
Today’s focus was “FASTER”. Our challenge was to sprint for ONE MILE. To break it down, we did seventeen 100-yard sprints throughout the day. (Fully committed to our goal, we completed our final sprint all dressed up in our Denim and Duct Tape costumes! We’ll post the video link tomorrow.)
Our morning training session started with Physical Testing using the US Ski Team’s protocol. Although sore and tired from the last two days of workouts, we saw some inspired performances.
From Coach Doug- “Feeling motivated by the campers, I entered the Box Jump test, which took me right back to my old USST days when I had hair on my head and tree stumps for legs. I gave it my best shot, but missed the record by one jump. We have some very fit campers here!”
Next was circuit training in the RPC, which included 16 stations, loud music and big efforts. Each coach took 4 kids and everyone rotated through each of the stations. We all rocked that gym with our sweat, fun, grit and laughter!
After lunch, we had our daily notebook meeting. Today we covered Sports Psychology and discussed how mental skills affect performance, and that you can train your mental skills the same way you train physical skills, like cross-blocking in ski racing, or penalty shots in soccer, or stick handling in lacrosse. We talked about setting goals and learning from our “failures”. One camper shared a story about over-thinking things in one of her races. She felt that she put too much pressure on herself which caused her to lose focus and ultimately crash in the race. A tough day on the slopes and a big lesson learned. We’ve all been there! But we all agreed that if you put in the mental training, you’ll have more confidence on game day, which will allow you to stay calm, handle distractions, stay positive and perform at your very best.
For our afternoon training block, we rotated through three activities- inline skating, obstacle course and cooking. A lot of kids made big improvements at the inline skating station, and believe it or not, no crashes! At the obstacle course, the campers dialed in their final practice session before our “ELITEAM Olympics” on Saturday. In the kitchen, the kids made Ooey Gooey Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins, and they were ooey gooey good! The only mishap was when Coach Morgan left the table for 10 seconds and a “pair of bakers” inadvertently added 4x the amount of tapioca flour… ooey gooey OOPS. To finish up our nutrition session, we talked about healthy fats, reading nutrition labels, and making good nutritional choices when it comes to our fuel… from pizza to chips to nut butters. Whatever food you like to eat, there are always ways to make it into a healthy and nutrient dense fuel for your body.
We ended the day with our Denim & Duct Tape costume night, an ice cream treat and a movie. As you’ll see in the photos tomorrow, there were some very impressive duct tape creations, although some caused very limited mobility, which made it quite challenging in the Limbo Contest! For the movie, they watched “The Big Green”, an old style soccer movie from the 90’s. The kids are now tucked into bed. They’ve worked really hard this week, so we’re going to skip morning run and instead get some extra Zzzzzz’s.
(Sorry… no blog posts from the campers tonight. We typically do that from 5-5:30pm and they were too busy dressing up for our costume night!)
