By Ryan Maloney, assistant women's volleyball coach
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| Senior Sara Madison (left) and junior Courtney Poirier |
I rent a room in a farmhouse 15 minutes outside Fredonia. It's a sparsely populated area, but I'm kept company by a flock of chickens and ducks, three cats, and two Australian Shepherds.
Last August, one of the dogs gave birth to seven puppies. Conveniently for our players it feel smack in the middle of preseason, so of course we had a night off to go visit the puppies.
Paradoxically, it may have been just as important as any practice session.
Training an athlete is a stressful process -- literally. Much like training for a marathon, training a volleyball player is a cycle of stress and recovery. You stress her a little more than she's used to during practice, give her time to recover, and she gets a little bit better.
But preseason compounds that stress tenfold. Players aren't used to the exhausting routine of two practices a day. For a freshman it might be the most stressful life transition she's experienced yet.
So playing with puppies is helpful, essential in fact. Especially when done with teammates, the social bonding can ease stress even more than sleeping. As immunologist Esther Sternberg observes in her book The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions, "The social world can activate the stress response, or it can tone it down. The effects of these personal connections can be more soothing than an hour of meditation."
We can't schedule a litter of puppies to be birthed every preseason, but we can be intentional with how we spend our time.
That said, one of the dogs is pregnant again.
Last August, one of the dogs gave birth to seven puppies. Conveniently for our players it feel smack in the middle of preseason, so of course we had a night off to go visit the puppies.
Paradoxically, it may have been just as important as any practice session.
Training an athlete is a stressful process -- literally. Much like training for a marathon, training a volleyball player is a cycle of stress and recovery. You stress her a little more than she's used to during practice, give her time to recover, and she gets a little bit better.
But preseason compounds that stress tenfold. Players aren't used to the exhausting routine of two practices a day. For a freshman it might be the most stressful life transition she's experienced yet.
So playing with puppies is helpful, essential in fact. Especially when done with teammates, the social bonding can ease stress even more than sleeping. As immunologist Esther Sternberg observes in her book The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions, "The social world can activate the stress response, or it can tone it down. The effects of these personal connections can be more soothing than an hour of meditation."
We can't schedule a litter of puppies to be birthed every preseason, but we can be intentional with how we spend our time.
That said, one of the dogs is pregnant again.