Camp Blackberry VIII

We just concluded the 8^th edition of Camp Blackberry. This is a week where my wife and I have all six of our grandchildren for the week, with field trips every day, great meals, art, crafts, lots of swimming, and lots of stories. We have our own song playlist and if you see us passing by on the road, we might all be singing at the top of our lungs. It seems like yesterday that they were all babies. Now they’re growing up, too fast for sure.

I’ve written about Camp Blackberry before. The idea isn’t ours—we got it from Dr. Bob and Sue Ramger, who did Camp Ramger for many years. We learned about their camp years ago and could hardly wait for our grandchildren to get old enough to start our own.

Ours is not a commercial operation and parents outside our genetic line need not apply. Someone asked me about going on vacation this week. Huh-uh. This is anything but a vacation. It is hard work and we usually crawl in bed at night exhausted. There is a reason God gives children to young people!

Our trips this week included kayaking on Indian Boundary Lake, tubing the Little River, horseback riding, pottery making at Studio 212, our annual visit to Lyles’ Farm, and our first visit to Dolly’s Pirates Voyage (oh my, it is awesome). We made it to Becky’s Grill and our final meal of the week is always Allison’s Catfish.

We cook. We sing. We share. We are together 24 hours a day. But what are we trying to accomplish? We want to be a part of our grandchildren’s lives in a different context. My wife spends a lot of time with them, as she keeps them during the day when their parents work. At Camp Blackberry, it is more a shared experience, with the cousins getting to know each other, sharing, arguing, but finding a way to do things together successfully.

Even though it is just one short week, there are lessons that we hope to teach. All of us will remember specific moments in our lives when things really change for us. I write about them here quite often. We don’t realize that slow, gradual evolution in our lives but quite vividly remember those epiphanous moments. We want to provide those moments of epiphany.

We want them to play together, so they become better teammates, family members, and co-workers. This is huge. When you’re young, you are by necessity focused on yourself. Maybe Camp Blackberry begins the journey about thinking about others, or at least how to function within a group.

We want them to be able to take instruction, so they become coachable and teachable, again, within the context of a group. It is occasionally important that they do something that they don’t understand, so that they learn to recognize how important it is to function within a group.

I’m not talking about following instructions without reason or to blindly do what those in authority tell us to do. It is our responsibility as parents/grandparents/leaders/teachers/coaches to make it understandable why we are asking someone to do something. The too simple “because I said so” is totally inadequate. We recognize that questioning authority is sometimes how great things are accomplished. We also want them to recognize that we must be responsible to a teacher, a coach, or a parent who is able to look at the big picture. That’s leadership (and more on that next week).

We want them to resolve conflict together, recognizing the greater good. To learn how to sacrifice self for the good of the larger group—for all of us want to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.

We want them to love life, to eat well, play hard, sleep enough, and love each other.

The Hamstring Dilemma

We see a lot of hamstring injuries in sports medicine. Hamstring injuries are poorly understood and difficult to treat. They can be really tough injuries to come back from.

Part of the reason for that is that there is a broad range of things that a hamstring injury can be. Start with the term “hamstring” itself. There isn’t just one “hamstring,” but instead, a group of three muscles that is collectively called the Hamstring. Those three muscles are the Semitendinosus, Semimembranosus, and Biceps Femoris.

The Semitendinosus and the Semimembranosus travel a similar path along the inside of the back part of the thigh and are the most commonly injured. One unique component off the hamstrings is that they cross both the hip and the knee, anchoring on one end at the base of the pelvis and on the other end on the tibia (lower leg bone). This is another part of why treating hamstring injuries is so difficult. 

Even if you can identify which muscle you are dealing with, there are several places where an injury can take place. Muscle fibers can tear within the body of the muscle. If severe enough of a tear, you may get a purplish bruising on the back of the thigh. Sometimes this can be quite visible but because the tear could be quite deep, lack of discoloration is not a sign of severity.

I have seen this kind of bruising from the buttock to the back of the knee and the person recovers quite quickly. I have also seen no discoloration at all and the injury takes forever to get better.

A hamstring can be injured on either end as well, where it connects. If you paid attention in Health class, you might remember that a ligament connects a bone to a bone (such as the Anterior Cruciate Ligament) and a tendon connects a muscle to a bone. Even within that tendon, it can be important to know if it is at the tendon-osseous junction (where the tendon connects to the bone) or the musculotendinous junction (where the tendon connects to the muscle). That alone can determine prognosis.

Crossing two joints, the hip and the knee, also makes the hamstrings incredibly important in athletic performance. That’s why hamstring injuries can be so devastating. It’s hard to function without them.

The typical treatment for a hamstring injury is to stretch it. It is never quite so simple. Look at it this way. Since most hamstring injuries are in the top half of the muscle, reaching all the way to where it attaches on the pelvis, pelvis stability is essential to recovery. Stabilizing the pelvis is a very complicated affair.

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about core strength. That’s part of what I’m talking about here. If the muscles supporting the pelvis are not strong, extra strain is placed on the hamstrings. That’s why good core strength is important in both prevention and treatment.

But too often, once the hamstring is injured, we focus only on stretching. While stretching is certainly important, it is definitely not everything. Weakness elsewhere must be addressed otherwise that rehab can be lengthy. And frustrating.

I call a hamstring injury an “invisible” injury. Unless there is visible bruising, there really isn’t anything you can see or feel. Oh, if the tear in the muscle is bad enough, experienced hands can feel a defect in the muscle itself. And if it is at that tendo-osseous junction I talked about earlier, an X-ray might provide important information.

Because it is mostly invisible and because it can last for a long time, others—coaches, parents, teammates—generally don’t understand. It’s been long enough…why don’t you just toughen up and get out there!

It’s never that simple. And the solution is more than just stretching. You need expert help.

Scrambling Eggs

We recently got back from a vacation to the beach. It was a wonderful time with the whole family. If your family is like mine, most days you can’t drag the kids out of the bed in the morning. But at the beach, the kids (grandkids, in this case) were up well before the adults.

One of my favorite things to do is to cook breakfast. I cook them whatever they want and if there aren’t leftovers, then I’ve misjudged. A couple of the grandkids love to help me and it is a joy to have them in the kitchen with me. The others…not so much. They just wait patiently.

I also cook breakfast every Sunday morning for my wife and I. I love to have it almost ready and then call her to the table, maybe from a slumber. So, where’s this going? What has this got to do with sports? I’ll get to that in a minute.

I love scrambled eggs. I love cooking scrambled eggs. I’m picky about my eggs. They have to be from pasture-raised chickens. Beat well. Allow butter in the skillet to sizzle a bit. Cook slow. Don’t overcook. A dash of salt and pepper.

So now you’re really wondering if I’ve lost my mind. This isn’t the Cooking Page, it’s the Sports Page. OK, so here’s the deal: Cooking those eggs Sunday morning made me think about how important it is to take care of the little stuff.

If you want to cook really great scrambled eggs, you’ve got to pay attention to the details. If you want to be a great athlete, you’ve got to do the little things.

A colleague shared a quote with me this week: “Inches make champions.”  It’s from Vince Lombardi. Coach Lombardi was known for his attention to detail. Nothing was unimportant to him on a football field.

I have been around a lot of very good and very successful coaches in my career. I can tell you that they all have one thing in common—they pay attention to those small details.

David Ellis was the best offensive line coach I’ve ever known. He was a master at teaching young men about life and blocking. And he never stopped addressing the details. His linemen took the right step every time.

Now that might not sound like such a big deal, but it is. If your first step is precise and intentional, you gain an advantage over the player that you are trying to block. The same thing is true for lots of sports. I know that with a lot of basketball moves, the first step makes all the difference.

I get asked a lot what it is that makes the local football teams so successful. That answer is difficult but one thing that I can tell them for sure is the attention to detail. I know that the MHS football team will still be doing the same drills, the same little things in November that they were doing in August.

I have heard Coach Ellis on many times on Monday during the last week of the season, after fourteen games and four weeks of preseason, tell his young charges, “we’ve got one more week to get it right.” That was just before he led them out to do one more drill to make sure that they got the little things right. That they got their steps down precisely.

What little things should you be paying attention to?

Thank You, Coach Ratledge

My high school football coach died this week. He was 91 and his health had been in decline for a while. If you’ve followed this column, you know my story and the influence he had on my life.

His name was Bert “Chig” Ratledge. I suppose the “Chig” was short for Chigger and a reference to his small stature. He was and always will be Coach Ratledge to me. I could never ever refer to him by that nickname.

I’m not going to rehash the story about how important he was to me. I do want to make it clear that the man I’ve become and the career that I’ve had is due in no small part to the fact that he believed in me. He believed I could be whatever I wanted to be and through football, proved it to me.

I know for a fact that he had the same impact on a lot of people. I was there for his 89^th birthday party, a small affair for a few of his stars and a few of his favorites. I was there for his 90^th birthday party too, where his daughter Jan opened it up to the whole community. There was a crowd.

That was the last time I saw him and he still commanded the room. At 90, he remembered everybody there and something about them. His wrecked spine forced him to stay completely bent forward at the waist, but he was still sharp and a giant among men.

His heart was immense. Condolences this week to his daughter were full of praise and adoration for what he had meant to so many. He was a football genius, implementing things like the veer offense and split tackle defense when only the colleges were doing so.

Don’t get me wrong, he could be intimidating. He rarely yelled—a look was all it would take. But he got everything out of his young charges. Even as an adult, if he told me to run through a brick wall, I would try it.

Let me get to the real point of today’s column. Teachers, Scout leaders, Coaches…adults everywhere…you have no idea how important your words can be to some young person. Good and bad, everything you say can be hugely impactful.

I’ve talked about the episode before where a friend and I were dropping popcorn onto bouffant hairdos below us at a basketball game. I couldn’t have been more than 8. This young mother told her young son, “please don’t grow up to be like them.” What was that? 58 years ago? I remember it like it was yesterday.

Your words can harm. “People like you don’t go to college.” I’m still resentful of that after all these years. I wish I could let it go but I can’t. I will say that it has driven me to achieve beyond my (and their) wildest dreams.

“He can be a good one if he works at it.” Coach Ratledge’s words changed me forever. Oh, I work at it. Man, do I ever work at it. I want to prove Coach Ratledge right. No problem is insurmountable if you’re willing to work hard enough.

Your words can be so powerful, not when you’re trying to pontificate or be profound, but more likely when you are just being honest and supportive. Or maybe it is an offhand remark and you didn’t realize who was listening. It has more to do with the circumstances and the listener.

But whatever you do, please choose your words wisely and carefully. You never know who is listening. And you never know whose life you are changing. Goodbye Coach Ratledge. Thank you.