USA Ultimate

This August, 44 of the best youth Ultimate players in America will be traveling to Germany to participate in the 2010 World Junior Ultimate Championships. But first, the Open and Girl’s teams will meet at Amherst College next week for a weeklong training camp hosted by USA Ultimate.

Five members of Team USA have agreed to blog about thier experiences for usaultimate.org - Bethany Kaylor, Sally Landefeld, Maddy Roorbach, Nick Stuart and Matt Barnes. Follow their progress here as they train, travel and compete throughout the next few weeks.

Our first entry comes from Bethany as she prepares for USA Ulimate's team camp in Massachusetts.

 

Let’s start off informally: my name is Bethany Kaylor and I live in Cincinnati, OH. I will be a senior at Ursuline Academy this fall. I play ultimate and competitive soccer. I love to read and write. John Irving is my semi-hero.

Hmm. Kind of sounds like an eHarmony profile. Whoops.

Anyways, I’m going to experiment with this "blog" of sorts for the U-20 U.S. Jr. National Ultimate Frisbee Women’s team. (If only we had an acronym…) My first post is supposed to explain what I have been doing to prepare, what I am excited for, etc. etc. So, here it goes:

Preparation:

Back in early June, the team received a workout plan crafted by our one of our coaches, Miranda. The workout guided us each week with four sets of exercises, drills, and running. Miranda noted that this workout was not rigid; we could revamp it according to our other activities and schedules. Basically, we just needed to be in the best conditioned state of our lives when we went to training camp, because training camp was not the place to get in shape.

Ever since the winter, I’ve been working with a CSCC (Collegiate Strength and Conditioning Coach) to prepare for the national try-outs and my spring soccer season. My trainer’s name is Jensen Brent and he works at the Human Performance Laboratory at Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital. During the summer, I’ve been going to the lab to work out two to three times a week for around 1 ½ hours. Jensen prepares each of my sessions beforehand.  They are created around two factions: maximizing power/strength and conditioning.

For the power part of my workout, I do box squats with varied amounts of weight. I deadlifts and do hang-cleans and hang snatches. I perform many different core exercises, as well. At the Lab, Jensen does a lot of research with preventing ACL injuries in young female athletes.  He incorporates this into my training by focusing on building up my hamstrings, since female athletes tend to be quad-dominated and have weaker hamstrings, which leads to ACL tears.

For the conditioning portion of my workout, I do band-sprints and run on an incline treadmill. (The latter blows major chunks.)

And, the most obvious, I play ultimate almost every other day.

What I’m excited for:

Oh, I’m pumped for so very many things. The first is becoming friends with my teammates and maturing into a national team. I can’t wait to be able to look at one of my teammates, make a certain type of eye contact, and know exactly what play is going to occur next.

I’m looking forward to creating some MAJOR upsets on defense. Our coaches seem to be extremely confident in our defensive potential and it’s rubbing off on me—I can’t wait to see my teammates lay-out D an opponent. Can you imagine the uproar our sideline will make? It’s going to be insane; I’m getting all tingly just typing this!

On a personal note, I am excited to see my brother, Zach. He has been studying abroad in Germany for the past month or so and will be flying home with us on August 12^th. I obviously haven’t seen him in a while and I quite miss his sarcastic comments and affinity for odd ice-cream concoctions. I can’t wait for him to watch the team play and see how amazing we all will be. I also need to overwhelm him with detailed descriptions of just how insane the movie "Inception" was.

Miscellaneous items:

I need to start packing. Like, now. I also need to go out and buy some munchies, like fruit snacks, pretzels, and Clif bars. I hope the food at training camp is legit…

I hope this first post was somewhat coherent. If not, my apologies.

Until next post,

Bethany Kaylor