For UW’s varsity athletes, the summer off-season isn’t for taking breaks — it’s for getting into shape.
Matheus Mello, midfielder on the men’s soccer team and 2B science and business student, says that the spring term is an especially grueling one “because it’s such a short season, and it’s like a lot of tactics, and a lot of physical work condensed into like a three-month period.”
During the summer, many members of the university’s men’s soccer team play on a semi-professional team for League1 Ontario (L1O). Training for L1O, which has players from university teams as well as older non-university players, involves a similar kind of training to the regular Ontario University Athletics (OUA) season — especially since the men’s soccer coaches take part in leading it. In what Mello describes as a “pretty intense training schedule,” there are generally four training sessions a week, additional pre-season fitness requirements, as well as practical sessions.
Overall, the L1O season causes a greater physical toll for soccer players than the regular OUA season does. “The quality is even a bit higher because it’s guys of all ages [and] a lot of ex-pros,” Mello says.
For many runners, training also continues in the summer — even though it technically is the off-season for cross country. Hillary Clark, member of the cross country team and a 2A optometry student, explains why.
“For distance runners, we have three seasons throughout the year: cross country in the fall, indoor track in the winter, and then outdoor track in the summer,” she says. In the fall, runners train for an eight-kilometer cross-country race with longer workouts and more mileage, whereas training in the summer is for shorter distance races. “Right now, I’m training for 1500s and 800s on the track,” she says. “My training’s a lot shorter and faster [than in the fall].”
Clark’s average day during the spring term consists of work during the day and practice at 5 p.m. When she gets home, she’ll do weights on her own, then make dinner. While the fall term is “a lot more difficult” since she has to balance studying for school, training in the spring still means that her nights “end up being pretty late usually.”
Even athletes who aren’t training for any official league or race for the summer still often have to practice. Ethan Crawford, co-captain of the men’s swim team and 3B nanotechnology engineering student, says that the spring term is an opportunity for swimmers to fine-tune skillsets they would otherwise have no time for during a regular season. “We can take more time to kind of focus on building techniques and working on the more fine-tuned stuff so that [we’re] still staying in decently good shape — and then that way when the regular season rolls around, it’s a lot easier to just put in more metres, more cardio, longer sets because you already fixed the little things throughout the off-season,” he says.
The swim team’s training regimen is similar to what they do during regular season, especially since UW has so many students on-campus in the summer due to the co-op structure. They swim six times a week, every morning Monday through Saturday. “We gym twice a week as a team and then once on our own,” Crawford adds.
Jaime Newell, forward on the women’s basketball team and 3A honours sociology student, says that staying in shape during the off-season is “definitely a bit of a grind” that prepares students for the intensive condition and fitness testing-filled pre-season of late August and early September. Training during the off-season happens three times a week — usually on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays — and looks a little different from a regular season, in which practice takes place five days a week. It’s a greater commitment than people often realize.
“It’s not just show up, you work out your two hours, and you go home. For people who have injuries, you show forty-five minutes to an hour early so you can get taped and do your stretching and do your proper warm-up so you’re able to play your best throughout that two hours of practice and afterwards, it’s like you still do your cool-down, you take an ice bath. It’s a lot longer process than, ‘Oh, I practiced like two hours a day.’”
She also adds that for athletes, a lot of thinking goes behind factors like meal planning so they can stay fueled during practice and save time throughout the day. A go-to meal for her is chicken, rice, and broccoli, or anything she can prepare in big batches. “I eat a good two hours before practice… With the amount of running and cardio we do, you don’t want to be feeling full and heavy and stuff like that, like it’s just not a great feeling so even that takes time to figure out when you’re gonna eat in the day,” Newell says.
This schedule can admittedly lead to struggle. However, it is one that athletes like Newell feel is worth working through. “I feel like it’s definitely a bit more difficult in-season like it’s a lot, especially with school and Waterloo just being a highly academic institution, but I feel like everyone’s mindset is [that] you’re doing this for the team, [and] we all have a collective goal that we are looking forward to achieve so everyone is there to show up for each other.”
