Sweat Hogs

If they come back the following practice, you have at best a 50/50 chance of having them in a team jersey 12 weeks later. Every practice that you see them might also be the last. They'll tell you how much they like it and vanish without a word of explanation.

They also fall into line with startling quickness. After 2 visits they arrive to practice with nary a nod to you, stash their phones, keys, iPods in the "phone basket" you keep in your truck. They go straight to the cup basket and dig their personally named cups (I've found that they like to draw hearts on their cups for some reason), They get a drink and tell you they are going to the bathroom.

They form a semi circle and ready for static stretches. They wait for the"join me in a jog, this way" and they slow at the 220 mark to see if you'll tell them to stop. After a few nights, you don't stop at the 220 or the 440 mark. You keep the agility stuff in there for another week. You stretch on picnic tables under a covered pavilion shelter..."throw your right hairy leg up on the table and join me in a 30 second hurdle stretch". They laugh at the "hairy leg" comment every time. You'd never say "chubby leg", or "fat leg", even though that would be funny, too. In fact you ban the words short, tall, skinny, fat, or any form of profanity (including "fricken" and "sucks") from the team vocabulary. It is one of the few rules that you have implemented but you enforce it immediately and directly when it's broken. You won't hear a "fat" or "shit" from any of them the entire time you'll know one another.

In the early days you limit the running so much that the stronger ones feel jipped. You warm up , stretch, do some drills, and cool down. You drink like fish. Staying cool is not possible. It is absurd to be training teen aged girls for an endurance sport in Florida from May to October.

You raise the bar ever so slightly each night. Walking drills (on heels and tip toes and pigeon toes and Charlie Chaplins). Marching drills. Form drills. High knees, butt kicks (you don't say "butt" around them for a month or so), and a myriad of skipping drills that lead to the perfect "striders". Now we can't run far but we run fast and mechanically sound.

Now we shoot for aerobic fitness . . . the challenge is to:

a) keep them safe and together under your watchful eye

b) keep them hydrated

c) keep them near a bathroom

and

d) keep them from quitting