Sport camp on crack!

From about age 12 to 18, I was a pretty intense athlete. I played competitive softball 12 months out of the year, trained often, and practiced three to four days a week. I even had a separate batting coach that used to play for the Blue Jays. But I was still a teenager. I still went out with my friends, hit the beach every now and then and spent time being a kid.

My class recently took a field trip to IMG Academies in Sarasota, Fla. At IMG, I feel like some of the kids lose their teenage years, but it may be worth it. IMG Academies is a campus devoted to the training of athletes. It began as the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Sarasota, Fla. This tennis academy became famous for training players like Andre Aggassi and Monica Seles. In 1987, IMG bought Bllettieri's academy and expanded the academy to take a comprehensive training approach to encompass additional sports. Today, IMG trains students in tennis, golf, soccer, baseball, basketball and mountain sports

The academy focuses its training on six key components: physical conditioning, mental conditioning, sports medicine, communication, nutrition and regeneration. These components work together to make a complete athlete.

I found the communication component to be the most interesting aspect of the program. A mediocre actor, Steve Shenbaum, and a former broadway performer, Blair Dalton, worked together to teach the athletes to communicate. For us, they played improv games and talked a lot. They teach the athletes to find coins when talking to people. Blair's example of a coin was scuba diving in the Keys for lobsters. They encourage the athletes to get to know people through these coins by asking questions and listening. However, as I left that day and saw the craziness that is IMG, I had to wonder, how can these kids gain coins when all they do is train?