COLUMBUS — Columbus Soccer Organization is launching a new initiative aimed at improving athlete health and wellness. The primary goal of the partnership is to raise awareness of nutrition, age-appropriate training and evaluation methods and mental health.
The program is sponsored by Columbus-based Allegro Family Clinics
“When you’re a coach, how you act, what you do, and how you understand your players is going to change them,” CSO Director Tom Velek said. “We have an obligation as an organization, and as coaches, to take the health and wellness of players seriously. If we don’t, we are reneging on a fundamental commitment we should have to the kids.”
In an organizational meeting last week, Velek laid out plans to provide online course modules as well as an aim to partner with both universities with NCAA programs in the area, Mississippi State and Mississippi University for Women.
In addition to a series of courses for players and parents, the organization plans to hold a speaker series to help educate and provide resources on player wellness. The organization hopes to find a local speaker and a “major regional or national speaker” to lecture on the topics of player wellness and safety.
The courses and the speaker series are sponsored by Allegro.
“We are basically bifurcating the program,” Velek said in a meeting unveiling the plan to CSO coaches. “We’re doing 6 months, basically kind of 2 semesters at a time. We’re getting funding for the first part here. If this first part goes excellently, which I’m sure it will, then we will have funding for the second part.”
Velek was joined in planning the initiative by CSO member and coach Gregg Twietmeyer, an associate professor of kinesiology at Mississippi State University. He is the author of “Fundamentals of Sports Ethics” as well as several articles on sports and philosophy in kinesiology.
In a conversation with The Dispatch, Twietmeyer stressed the importance of balancing the competitiveness of sports with a greater awareness of health and well-being, especially for minimizing the risk of burnout or suffering injury.
“We live in a hyper-competitive sporting culture, and that has trickled down to youth leagues as well,” Twietmeyer said. “It’s unhealthy in a host of ways because it prioritizes winning and prestige and the scoreboard while other things fall by the wayside. That affects wellbeing, mental health and passion for the game because it turns what should be play into one more avenue of obligation and work.”
Twietmeyer laid out a plan to target coaches of younger teams specifically, hoping to register habits with new coaches and young players alike to hopefully prolong safety and interest in the game and prevent overwhelming kids as they advance in the game.
“With coaches, we’ve got modules that go into greater detail about rest and recovery, practical philosophical questions about player assessment and appropriate age training, and so forth,” he said. “I’ve seen here and elsewhere in my decades of soccer coaching, coaching who can’t look beyond the immediate moment. They don’t look for potential, they look for who can help them win now, and with players who are 8 that isn’t the question you should be asking.”
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