Features: Training Sam
But now, at Hill Top Prep in Rosemont, where Sam is doing well in ninth grade, he’s playing basketball. We’re all for it, but he’s behind athletically — all those years not playing didn’t help.
I got wind that Summit might. Steve Mountain, a sports agent who reps Pat Croce, Jameer Nelson, sports pundit Stephen A. Smith and 45 others, has built three training centers (in West Chester, Aston and Bryn Mawr, the first, which opened in 2002) for the high-end pros he represents and wants to attract; they’re teched out with high-speed running and hockey treadmills and plyometric regimens of quick footwork and rhythmic jumping to max out speed, balance, coordination.
But Mountain also has a big thing for kids, and what we’re doing wrong raising them. Like a lot of obsessions, this one started early: He was a Northeast Philly kid, the youngest of eight and a child of divorce; he was also sports-crazy, but didn’t get proper training. The problem is bigger, though, than lousy coaching — Mountain is positively evangelistic on how we’ve got to do a better job with our children: 43 percent of kids obese, a culture too obsessed with winning, too much Sega after school! “Why not come home from school and do something for two hours, and in that two hours continue the learning without them knowing it? Teach them how to use their bodies — sports take confidence, a swagger, to master, and that swagger starts in your brain. When kids are awkward, and not being coached to be better, then they are going to lose confidence, and if they are going to lose confidence then they are going to lose relationships, and if they lose relationships, at some point they don’t have a seat in the cafeteria, and at some point it affects their whole demeanor with the world.” Hello, Sam.
It is a cultural mantra in helping inner-city kids: Get to them through sports. Why not suburban kids as well? Mountain created Summit with a simple notion of what the gyms would be about: teaching anyone, of any age or ability, to develop and use his body the same way Mountain trains his pros. Anybody who walks into Summit, if he’s willing to put in the work and fork over 900 bucks, will get an initial three-month program designed for him (or her) with plenty of trainer attention. (Less intensive and cheaper programs are also available.) The workouts are conducted in small groups: my son alternating on the inclined treadmill — his 137 pounds firing away at 11 miles an hour — with a 185-pound St. Joe’s prep footballer, or maybe Oregon running back Chris Vincent, who’s trying to cut his time in the 40-yard dash from 4.37 to 4.2. That’s world-class fast. Sam, he’s just learning how to run.
He was nervous and withdrawn when we started going to Summit last July. No wonder: I’d know it was Sam on the treadmill without looking, because his feet slapping down echoed 60 feet across the room. He ran stooped from the waist, his lower body doing too much of the work; on a device where his ankle was strapped to a cord — you’re supposed to sweep your foot backward along the floor against weighted tension, and then bring your knee up high in a smooth bicycling motion to land where you started — Sam looked like a wild, tethered colt trying to break free.
