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Final Blog #8

I have had such a wonderful time working on my project. I am so grateful I was able to work with Coach Lew in the strength department. It was truly an experience full of learning. I was able to learn from the coaching/trainer perspective which is vastly different from the athlete one. As an athlete, we show up and the plan for the day is laid out for us, but I now understand how much planning goes into our training and how much time, effort, and consideration is put into not only the plan for one day but for the entire annual calendar which is called periodization. I also learned a lot about athlete recovery. Recovery is so important to optimize one’s performance and the more proactive and attentive to it the greater one’s ability to benefit from it. Utilizing recovery can accelerate your progression as an athlete. Another major aspect of my project I learned about was the international framework of the Long-Term Athlete Development Model (LTAD). The LTAD is a structure used to enhance...
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Blog #7

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  After my trip, I was definitely ready to come back and work in person. When I walked back in on Monday I saw that Coach Lew had just gotten a new shipment of belts and sensor chips. These are used to track our times while sprinting and can be used as another way to implement athlete monitoring in order to gauge fatigue. I know the swim team and others utilize this form of monitoring over time to track their times by tracking sprint times at the same time and day each week in order to gauge how tired they are at that specific moment in their training. My first task once I got back was to help him shorten the belts and add the chips onto the correct belts so they could be added to the rest of them and be put into use. Next, we continued to work on the content portion of the product trying to pinpoint exactly what we want/need within it. This is probably the most difficult part because we have so much content it is difficult to cut and narrow it down to a non-overwhelming amount, bu...
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Blog #6

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  Doing a senior project can be challenging. You don’t really have many of the constraints or structures that an intensive or school has. This definitely makes it much more interesting because you are able to study and work on topics and ideas you truly enjoy. By wanting to put time and effort into something you are passionate about is mostly a great thing it can be hard to stay focused and grounded without thinking too far ahead or too big. This has been one of the more challenging aspects I have come across during my senior project. I have wanted to try and do too much without thinking about how I actually would be able to accomplish it. Another challenge I ran into was I had to be away physically for three days over the course of the project last week in order to compete in the winter junior national championship in Greensboro North Carolina. While I was away Coach Lew asked me to reflect on the ideas we had been working on in regards to recovery. Personally, I was able to refle...
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Blog #5

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  Another important aspect of the project is how to involve the Hawken community in the notion of student and student-athlete recovery. But in order to involve the community, it was first important to figure out where the community’s mindset and habits towards recovery are. So, Coach Lew and I decided to curate an inquiry to send out to all of the upper school students. We ended up getting one hundred and twenty-four responses, and the data we collected was compelling and helped us capture a snapshot for our student body. It definitely could use a few improvements before/if it gets sent out again but it was a good way to get a starting data set to compare any future sets too. Another feature Coach Lew wants to start incorporating, to check student-athletes recovery response, is the readiness check on teambuildr app. We have used the teambuildr app before for temperature monitoring and Hawken athletes use it for all of their strength workouts, and it would be simple to incorporate i...
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Blog #4

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  While working on my project it prompted a lot of questions and self-reflection about my own experiences with athletics and in particular my sport of swimming. In one of my long discussions with coach Lew where we talked about the development of athletes and athletic burnout at a young age, we discussed how it has become much more common in youth sports because they are pushed too hard to fast through the LTAD model in correspondence to their chronological age. When an athlete was pushed too hard or asked to specialize too soon it could really accelerate burnout. Our conversation allowed me to open up and talk about the fact that I had almost quit swimming when I was thirteen. After learning this, coach Lew came up with the idea to have me self-reflect on why and what impacted me prior to and/or leading up to almost quitting, then write about why I almost quit, and finally reflect and communicate what got me through it. I spent time reflecting on my time not only in the pool and o...
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Blog #3

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  During my project so far I have been introduced to The Way of The Hawk. I am planning on including this in my guide because it is an important aspect of being a student-athlete at Hawken. I never knew about this part of our athletic department existed until this year which I think is sad. It is the core values and integrity of what being a Hawken Athlete means. It is now plastered within our weight on the racks so hopefully, others will be introduced to it long before I was because of its visibility. Speaking of the new weight/wellness center during my project I have gotten to see it in all of its beauty. The amount of technology and performance-enhancing equipment will allow our athletes to train at a completely new level. There are new Ipads that help track athletes’ workouts are magnetic and stick to the squat racks. After they were done charging I helped rearrange the home screens and app layouts of the Ipads to condense them and make sure all the apps needed were downloaded ...
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Blog #2

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  I have honestly and thoroughly enjoyed working on my project so far. Working with Coach Lew and Coach Devin has been such a cool experience and my conversations with them have opened me to so many questions and ideas about the well-being of students, student-athletes, and members of the Hawken community that I wouldn’t have thought of before. I think I am able to give them a different perspective to think about while producing and/or introducing the different aspects of training. I learned about how they plan out an athlete's calendar. They use an annual calendar so they can plan out not only the determined training periods but an athlete's off-season and they even mark out specific times for total recovery as well to make sure athletes avoid burnout. Athlete Burnout is a condition where an athlete becomes stressed, overtrained, overworked, psychologically drained, and completely loses interest in their sport and this can be paired with declining athletic performances but it ...
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