Hear from one of our pupils, James, as he shares his account of an action-packed visit to St George’s Park, where pupils experienced a day in the life of a professional athlete.
We left school, early morning, in the minibuses and drove through the countryside to arrive at St Georges at about 9am. The first thing that struck me was just how massive everything was, and the players could access for free at any time! We went to the Hilton Hotel that is joined to the main training centre where players stay for extended periods for rehab and training camps to wait for the coaches to arrive, and walked around the lobby, where various accolades hung on the walls from different England teams. When they arrived, we went to one of various astroturf pitches that were dotted around the site. We started by doing some running technique drills, which were followed by some timed sprints (shoutout to Will for the best time).
After that, we did a dribbling drill, where different stations around the pitch worked on different skills, the same drill that professionals do, just on a much smaller scale. It was interesting to get an idea of what they do daily to improve. To finish on the pitch, we did a one-kilometre timed run, which Will ran virtually the same standard as the pros! Next we had lunch in a conference room in the main building and went into the gym. There, we tested out each of our max verticals, our score on the Nordic curl machine, and our max ten second burst on the watt bike. My favourite piece of equipment here were the pads in the floor that’s measured the max vertical, each of which cost thousands of pounds.
Then, using some of the knowledge we had just learned in the gym, we designed a workout in groups of five around a certain athlete, which was optimised for specific skills, and presented it in front of the rest of the group, where we received feedback. The final thing that we did was hydrotherapy, in the pool. We were taken through various exercises for recovery in the warm pool, then moved to the cold plunge and hot plunge. We had to do one minute in one pool and one minute in the other, alternating with our different groups. The cold plunge was 11 degrees, and was made worse by teachers pouring water on our heads! But all in all, I think that was my favourite part of the trip.
What was astonishing was the pros did the whole thing for five minutes in each, doing 5X what we did. All in all, the trip was interesting and insightful, and on behalf of everyone that went, I want to thank Mr Macdonald, Mr Caviezel-Cox and Mr Lloyd for organising it.
James (Divs)
