IMG Field Trip

Yesterday, our class caught a gigantic bus to the IMG/Bollettieri Academy, and spent about four hours touring around the slick, grown-up, yet kiddie-infested complex.

I played tennis for a long time as a child/teen, and I had heard of the Bollettieri part of the academy when I was growing up, so it was fun seeing what it would have been like if I had had a million dollars to spend on my tennis "career" back then (and been good enough), and thus been able to go to the academy. One guy I went to school with actually did go to there, but I wasn't friends with him, so I never really heard what it was like.

So, yesterday was my chance. And I was not disappointed. It is a beautiful facility, with a great staff (although, they were not all great speakers). "The trainer," was especially bad (well, overly technical), but I think part of that was that he obviously assumed we were aspiring trainers too - I don't think anybody would refer to a journalistic interviewee as a "client."So, he gave us the most difficult running drills to try and do (trust me, we did not do the simple butt-kick or anything. We did ballet-inspired, plyometrics).

Anyway, one talk that I did enjoy was with these two former actors. They led the "game on" aspect of the program, which basically teaches sports stars, or wannabe sports stars, to not bore everyone with their talk about their training, their sports performance, and their diet. They need to have "coins" (interests, personal qualities, something fascinating to say), so that people will want to be friends with them, and so that they don't look like stupid jocks when the media interviews them.

Another point of this class was to teach them to think of these other things they have going for them when they're under pressure (e.g. matchpoint), so that they won't choke. Instead, they will be able to relax and think this isn't the most important thing in my life, the game that will decide if I get a multi-million dollar sponsor, the game that will decide if my pushy "helicopter parent" loves me, but instead will be able to think I have ordinary qualities (like enjoying the beach) that are just as important as my sporting achievement. Or so the theory goes. Whether this works for everyone, I'm not sure, but it was the most entertaining part of the day.

The nutritionist was a bit of a let-down (not that she didn't clearly know her stuff), but she talked about how she gives her clients real-life translations of what 30 percent protein looks like, but we got nothing more than a statistical analysis.

The sports psychologist was interesting (well, the quiz we took was fun), but he didn't really give us any information about his job. I wanted to hear the advice he gave Pete Sampras or Anna Kournikova or something. But, maybe because we arrived late (despite having a GPS, we got lost), so I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that if we had had more time, he would have given us some interesting tit-bits.

Anyway, despite a lot of it being a bit elitist and technical, I really did enjoy the day, and I can see how for a teenager, or a professional athlete, it would be an amazing thing to experience on a daily basis.