Every school has multiple sports teams, and when participating in a sport, you always want your school to be the best. To achieve this, you must train and work extremely hard with purpose. When training for your sport, you need to be committed and consistent with your efforts; otherwise, results won’t show much, and your improvement will be minimal.

 Speaking as a basketball player for Coral Glades High, we work very hard as a team, whether it’s on or off the court, because the little stuff matters. What I mean by the “little stuff” is taking care of your body and ensuring it is fit and in shape for how you want to play basketball.

 Doing things like waking up at 4:00 am to attend our 5:00 am practice to get extra work in, running and conditioning our legs in 90-degree weather, so our stamina is a lot better than most teams, and coaches making sure that we have access to the gym so that we can put up a lot of shots. A big part of playing sports is maintaining your body throughout the entire season, which is hard for a lot of people because their bodies aren’t being fed the proper food and the proper amounts of water needed for the average athlete’s body.

 Stretching is one of, if not the most underrated, ways to improve your performance because your body will be able to move freely without certain muscles being tight, and prevent injuries. 

While stretching is a big part of recovery, eating, drinking, and sleeping are very important too. If you’re not getting enough rest at night, it won’t take long before you start to notice you’re getting fatigued faster and falling asleep during class, and then you’ll be behind, so rest is very imperative.

 Going to practice in hot weather is very dangerous when done on an empty stomach or when dehydrated. Every team doesn’t need to be doing the same things, but they should be consistent in what they do. 

Consistency is key, not just to sports but also to life. It’s one thing to go hard one time out of the whole week, but that will not help the team get ahead in what they want to achieve. 

Although to be consistent, you have to have a good mindset and be mentally prepared to do something when you don’t want to, knowing that it will help you in the future. Having a good mental attitude helps you more than you could imagine, and being an encouraging coach or teammate can be very important when building up someone else’s mental toughness.

To sum it up, being great requires more than just wanting it, you have to go out there and train to be great. You need to be physically ready, mentally ready, eating right, hydrating right, and taking care of your body. Once everyone buys in, teams will notice themselves getting a lot better and will be ready for their upcoming season!

We asked junior Madison Watts, What do you think all the sports teams at Coral Glades can do to make their training more elite to prepare for the season this was her response “I think to make Coral Glades High School teams training more elite and to be prepared for the season we need to have our student athletes understand the concept of the game better as well as properly take care of their bodies to make sure they are able to effectively play at 100%”

We also asked sophomore Maliha Gordon, Do you think running in 94-degree weather is more helpful than it is dangerous? She said, “To be honest, it really depends on the person because when you run in hotter temperatures, your body works harder to cool down, and most people can’t handle it, and most people can.”