The Western Province Schools Water Polo Association last month sent the players they selected for the SA Schools tournament to the Sports Science Institute of South Africa for testing, and were quite shocked by the results.
According to their Facebook page, an alarmingly high percentage of the players, particularly under-15 girls, under-16 boys and under-19 girls, are going into the season carrying shoulder injuries and/or playing with varying levels of discomfort.
Justin Durandt, the Sports Science Institute’s high performance centre manager, found the statistics worrying and said they have done work with rugby teams where the injury rate is lower.
Now water polo has something of a reputation as a rough game, but that is undeserved and it is, in fact, quite low impact, with the odd finger in an eye, or a hand injury due to the ball striking it awkwardly, generally the only injuries. The sport’s rapid growth in popularity among girls attests to that.
No, the injuries discovered in the testing are due to over-training. Perhaps more than other sports at junior levels, water polo requires very high levels of physical fitness and so the players spend many hours in the water, pre-season, sometimes in water that’s still quite cold.
Durandt and his team are adamant there must be better pre-season conditioning; players must have adequate rest and recovery time when first identifying an injury (and not return to full training before properly healed); and the importance of a well-structured warm-up programme should not be ignored.
It’s important, he said, to note the variability in physical and psychological maturation among children of the same chronological age. “The frequency, duration or intensity of physical activity appropriate for one child may be overwhelming, both physically and emotionally, for a same-age peer,” he said.
And there’s a clear correlation between training volumes and risk of injury. “The research indicates that athletes who spend more hours per week playing their sport than their age are 70 percent more likely to experience a severe injury.”
A few years ago, I spoke to eminent Joburg sports medicine specialist Dr Jon Patricios, who warned of the dangers of over-training young athletes who were not yet mature enough to handle it.
He was concerned that intense specialised training – at a level usually applied to professional players – is now being introduced at school level. This means many hours of working on specific muscle groups and aspects of co-ordination, to the exclusion of others.
As a result, in his practice, they are coming across repetitive stress injuries and muscular problems in children previously found only in adult players after many years of sport at top levels.
For example, they treat growing numbers of schoolboy fast bowlers a year who have stress fractures of the lower back due to too many hours of bowling in the nets and on the cricket field. These are injuries previously only found in older cricketers, nearing the end of their careers.
And, as the Western Province water polo study shows, too much swimming causes shoulder problems. Most madala water polo players, like I once was, suffer at some stage from “surfer’s shoulder” – rotator cuff – problems. According to Patricios, research shows that younger swimmers with heavy workloads also present that condition.
It all comes down to what I was on about in this space last week – early specialisation in sport and an over-emphasis on winning that has given a “professional” approach to sport at school credibility.
The South African Schools Water Polo tournament is a celebration of youth sport. More than a thousand boys and girls spending a week of their December holiday out in the sunshine, being active. And there will be a horde of adult volunteers there, making it all possible for them.
Let’s hope that, behind the scenes, punishing training regimens have not harmed many of the young players before they even turn up.