ROCKLAND, Maine — Double sessions of preseason practice have represented a rite of passage for generations of high school football players.
Two-a-days are underway this week at many Maine schools under strict guidelines regulating the length of practice sessions, protective equipment used, amount of contact allowed, and recovery time — all designed to help players cope with the mid-August heat.
“The biggest concern with preseason is acclimatization, acclimatization not only to the heat but also re-acclimatization to the sport,” said Chris Sementelli, program manager for MaineGeneral Sports Medicine in Augusta and a liaison to the Maine Principals’ Association sports medicine committee.
While double sessions remain the norm at many high schools, some programs have veered away from the tradition for reasons that have less to do with Mother Nature and more to do with changing demographics and competing demands.
Work schedules of players and coaches, transportation challenges for players without driver’s licenses, family obligations and a shrinking talent pool because of the steady decline in statewide school enrollment all have motivated teams to adopt single-session schedules early in the preseason. That way, football doesn’t take up the entire day.
The trend has prompted at least two committees of the Maine Principals’ Association to consider adding a single-session alternative to the association’s current preseason practice format that is designed to focus on the acclimatization process but is geared more toward double sessions.
“I think in your programs that are struggling you’ll find that’s one of the reasons we do [single sessions], to get kids there,” said Molly Bishop, athletic administrator at Oceanside High School of Rockland-Thomaston and a member of the Maine Principals’ Association’s sports medicine committee.
“You have to work around the availability of kids or otherwise you won’t have a team,” she said.
The goal is to develop a single-session practice format for the outset of preseason workouts that still addresses health issues while providing players equal field time whether they participate in single- or double-session training camps. The solution may be a longer single session.
Under the Maine Principals’ Association acclimatization schedule, double sessions may include two individual practices ranging from 2¼ hours each on the first day of practice to 2¾ hours each on the fifth and sixth days — with at least three hours of recovery time between the two practices.
When on a two-practice schedule, no workouts can be held between 11:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. to avoid activity during the most intense temperatures of the day.
For schools following a one-a-day practice schedule, that single session is not to exceed three hours.
Supporters of the move stress that any changes won’t take away from the double-session practice concept still prevalent today, but merely complement it for schools that have opted for single sessions.
“As we’re trying to acclimate the kids and be pro-concussion policy and help more kids play the game, the one thing we don’t want to do is alienate the coaches who have developed a culture in their programs that works for them,” said Dan O’Connell, head football coach at John Bapst Memorial High School of Bangor and the Maine Football Coaches Association’s liaison to the Maine Principals’ Association’s football committee. “You want to help the programs that need it, but you don’t want to upset the apple cart for the programs that have something working pretty well that want to leave it the same way.”
Balancing work and football
At Oceanside High School, head football coach Wes Drinkwater and several of his players work on the ocean as lobstermen, with the summer a lucrative time of year that runs head-first into the start of football practices.
“Coach is a lobsterman who back in the day was a kid who was a lobsterman, so he sees that if he’s going to get those kids out for football, he needs to be flexible in how he approaches what kids do in the beginning of preseason,” said Bishop, who in her high school days also held a lobstering license.
As a result, Oceanside holds single-session preseason football practices to accommodate the maximum number of players.
“Every kid that’s working is trying to balance sports and school and work and family, and it’s difficult for coaches to determine what’s the best time to have practice,” Bishop said.
“But half of the kids on the team who work are probably working day jobs, and that makes it difficult for them to get there in the morning, and then with the number of kids who work in the restaurant industry, chances are they’re working night jobs, so it really is sort of split,” he added.
“And for those kids who need money or it’s their first taste of money, sometimes it’s hard to pull them back into sports,” Bishop added.
Bucksport, a traditional hotbed of small-school football in eastern Maine, also schedules single-session preseason workouts.
“More and more kids are working,” said Ed Hatch, the Bucksport athletic administrator and chair of the Maine Principals’ Association football committee, “or there are younger kids who don’t have their [driver’s] license because those requirements have changed over the years and they’re not getting their license as early as they used to, so it’s tougher for them to get to and from practices.”
Guidelines in the annual Maine Principals’ Association football bulletin cover double sessions through the first six days of practice. That schedule is followed by controlled scrimmages on Monday of the second week of workouts, leading to exhibition games the following weekend and then another week of practices leading to season openers, this year Sept. 2-3.
Double sessions may continue after the initial six-day period, but the frequency of scrimmage/exhibition games and the start of the school year often limit the number of subsequent double-session opportunities.
The idea to add single-session standards to the double-session regulations stems from the executive committee of the Maine Football Coaches Association, which has shared its suggestions with the Maine Principals’ Association’s football and sports medicine panels.
“You can go doubles, and it will be very similar to what it is now if not the same,” O’Connell said, “and then having a one-session option that doesn’t violate the acclimatization process or the contact process but allows the team that can only get there one time a day to be able to still teach and execute what they need to do like they were having doubles.”
The football committee, with support from the sports medicine committee, hopes to develop a proposal for consideration by the Maine Principals’ Association’s general membership next spring. If given final approval, any additions could be included in the Maine Principals’ Association’s football bulletin for the 2017 season.
“Many of the coaches I’ve spoken to, all around the state and at schools of varying sizes, are having a harder and harder time of getting kids to commit to football because of the nature of double sessions,” said O’Connell. “It’s not because of the physical nature of them necessarily, but just getting them to commit to two sessions.”
O’Connell and Hatch said the Maine Principals’ Association’s sports medicine committee will be a critical resource in developing the complementary single-session guidelines before any final proposal is presented.
“We’re looking to make [single sessions] more of a viable option, to leave alone what’s already there but have an another option for schools,” said Hatch, “That’s especially for schools of our size, but you can probably make the argument for a lot of ‘C’ schools and even some ‘B’ schools that are struggling to get kids to school at a certain time of the morning and then getting them back to practice again in the evening.
“Really it boils down to trying to have competitive fairness, but whatever is written obviously has to take safety as the priority,” he said.
Once the football committee develops an initial proposal, it will be reviewed by the sports medicine panel.
“We want to do what we can to work with the football committee to make sure we can offer an alternative for those situations, but we want to make sure that from the standpoint of science that rest, recovery and refueling time is allowed for and that it’s adequate to maintain the safety of the athletes,” said Sementelli.
O’Connell said the last thing the coaches want to do in encouraging a single-session alternative is to endanger the players, adding that there’s been a general reduction in contact at practices throughout the season in recent years.
“When the sports medicine committee tells us that no matter what we present for change that first and foremost we have to get the kids acclimated to the heat and we have to take care of the kids physically, I don’t think there’s a coach in the state who would balk at that,” he said.
