Little Summer Break For Montclair High School Athletes

Summer time may mean relaxation for many Montclair High School students, but for its student athletes, especially those who play fall sports, it simply means the beginning of a very aggressive season. Just because preseason doesn’t start till August 11 doesn’t mean that Montclair High School fall athletes are taking any kind of break.

Many MHS athletic programs use the summer break as an opportunity to work together as a team over the summer. They want to use this time to bond, improve their techniques, and prepare for the upcoming season. Every MHS team varies in what it does to achieve these goals, some host practices and camps for their players in town while others, like the MHS field hockey team, send a team of interested players to a sleep away camp.

Every summer the MHS field hockey program organizes a team camp that all players throughout the program can participate in. Attendance at these camps is not mandatory, considering it may not fit into some people’s budgets or schedules. The camps are typically held at places like Princeton or Montclair State and are not solely Varsity events, meaning they are open to Junior Varsity and freshman players as well.

MHS field hockey players attend team camps for a multitude of reasons: improving their skill and overall technique, bonding with their teammates, and learning how to play on the field as a team.  

“I think these sleepaway camps are good because not only are we able to learn skills from really experienced players who play at an intense Division I level, but we’re also learning to advance our skills as a team,” says rising senior Courtney McMorrow.

The sleepaway camps, which are typically held at colleges and universities, are run by a knowledgeable and experienced coaching staff. A lot of the time, these counselors have coached and played at not only the intense collegiate level, but national and international levels as well.  

While their impressive credentials may cause them to appear imposing, their personalities and ability to connect with the campers makes them excellent counselors. Many of these counselors want to bond with their campers and will goof around with them, make inside jokes and share stories about themselves to develop a nice relationship and ultimately make the teaching of new skills and such more laid back and fun.  

Camps like these are great for learning new skills and improving your technique. For many sessions the camp is divided into “stations” in which each team spends fifteen to twenty minutes at each station learning a new trick or move. Campers learn new skills or simply new variations of old skills that help them improve their game. Later on in the evening, when scrimmages are set up, the players are encouraged to utilize the skills they just learned in live game play.  

“I definitely think going to a team camp helps us improve our skills,” says rising sophomore Emily McCarthy. “It’s great because it doesn’t just help us individually, but helps us improve as a group.”

Improving skills as a team is crucial to having a good season. Learning new skills on your own is of course helpful, but only helpful to yourself and, as McMorrow puts it, “There’s no ‘I’ in team!”

These camps also provide an excellent indication to the upcoming season. They are a sort of “preview” of what can lie ahead come fall.

“Working as a team before season is helpful because it really gives an idea of what we need to work on for season,” explains 2012 Varsity co-captain Fabiana Citro.

Rising senior Eliana McCann Smith agrees, “I think going to these camps is a really great precursor to season. It’s good to see how our team will be working together and where we need to improve.”

The nighttime scrimmages that are organized at camps like these force the team to work together before season, which not only displays the team strengths, but also exposes the weaknesses that may possibly hinder the team come season.

The most important aspect of a team sleepaway camp however is team bonding. Having a great team bond is synonymous with a successful season. When teammates are comfortable with one another it translates to better on field chemistry.

On our most recent team camp trip to the University of Connecticut, team bonding was one of our top priorities. Having lost a great deal of our starting players to 2012 graduation, new bonds needed to be formed between the rising seniors and the underclassmen. The UConn camp was the perfect setting for this.

“I think going to the UConn camp really helped us become more of a team,” confirms rising junior Linda Meliani.

Citro agrees, “I think we really did bond because for the duration of the camp we were always together. We played scrimmages together, ate our meals together, and we hung out in each other’s dorm rooms at night. We really spent a lot of time together getting to know each other. It was like one big field hockey sleepover, which was great.”

The UConn camp has left Citro and the rest of the players feeling quite positive about the upcoming season.

“We played really well together,” says Citro. “I’m optimistic, I think we’ll have a really great season.”

While not every MHS team may get the chance to go away to a sleepaway camp like field hockey does, it’s still important to get together and work together during the summer off season. Working together will not only yield a more successful season, but will help keep the MHS teams remain the safe and fun social environments that they are.