CROWDED ROOM

Tustin senior Cindy Stuck believes her aquatic performances this season will be influenced more by time spent training on land rather than in the pool.

Stuck, a driver on the girls’ water polo team and a distance swimmer, is one of a growing number of high school athletes, particularly girls, who have turned to weightlifting for a competitive edge.

Three times a week for a couple of hours each day, Stuck hits the Tillers’ weight room under the bleachers at Northrup Field to pump some of the same iron used by her football-playing classmates.

“Dry-land weight training just makes things in the pool seem easier and makes me swim faster,” she said.

Fueled by competition for college scholarships, increased demand from the general student population and continued growth in the number of girls participating in sports, high school weightlifting has become popular with more than only gridiron hopefuls.

But an increase in the number of students turning to weight training has also created problems. Overcrowding, poorly maintained equipment, unsupervised weightlifting and a lack of adequately trained instructors has the potential to do more harm than good.

“We see so many athletes coming to us who are doing the wrong things,” said Ken Vick, director of Sports Performance, a Manhattan Beach-based training and sports medicine facility that consults with 25 Southern Section high schools. “Coaches think it’s important, especially with the explosion of girls’ sports, but many are not trained in how to be a good weightlifting coach.”

According to national figures released by the Fitness Products Council, use of free weights by all males and females 6 years of age or older increased 127% to 42.8 million participants from 1987 to 1996, the last period when statistics were available. During the same time, the number of females who lifted free weights more than doubled to 16.8 million.

That trend is being mirrored in high schools, according to Harvey Newton, executive director of the National Strength and Conditioning Assn. It has also added more demands on school weight rooms.

“What we see more and more are high school coaches indicating to us that there is steady use of weight rooms by other classes throughout the day,” Newton said. “There’s a greater demand to weight train by students who are not athletes than there has been in the past.”

Contributing to the pressure on weight-training facilities is the Southern Section’s encouragement of off-season lifting by all athletes.

“It’s not a statistic we keep, but we’re not aware of any program that doesn’t have weight rooms,” Southern Section associate commissioner Bill Clark said. “You’ve got girls involved now and it gives them an edge, particularly in sports like shotputting and other strength sports. They’re all weight training now,”

At most schools, football teams have been given priority in weight rooms because of long-standing traditions. In many cases schools have been forced to add facilities to ease overcrowding.

“It used to be that you would get your jocks and jockettes in early or late in the day and not worry about the room the rest of the time,” Newton said. “But now, kids want to be in the weight rooms. In many cases it’s being taken as an elective. At schools where football is king, there won’t be much time for anyone else.”

Certified strength coaches such as Stephanie Ciarelli, a walk-on coach at Huntington Beach High, believe weight training in other sports has become so important that schools have a responsibility to provide all athletes with the same benefits.

“Weightlifting has always had the stereotype that it belonged only to football or it was a sport for big people,” Ciarelli said. “Well, it isn’t that way anymore. For both boys and girls, strength and endurance is vital for every sport.”

Newton agrees. Next month, his association anticipates publishing a position paper that he believes will justify why every U.S. high school should have a full-time, certified strength coach.

“We know all sports benefit from resistance training,” Newton said, “so why not have one person on staff who can interface and design custom workouts to avoid training problems for athletes and benefit all sporting teams?”

Of course, with schools relying heavily on walk-on coaches, Newton’s wishes are not likely to come true.

Arron Retterer, a certified athletic trainer at IntenseCity Sports Medicine Institute of Irvine, said schools such as Huntington Beach, which have weight-training supervisors who can tailor individual workouts to fit swimmers and soccer players alike, will benefit in the long run.

“As athletes, particularly girls, get more competitive, they will look for a way to give them an edge,” Retterer said. “What works for football and other proven sports doesn’t necessarily work for every sport. These other athletes need workouts that are better for their sport.”

For instance, a football lineman has to explode off the line of scrimmage to block an opponent in one quick movement that lasts several seconds. Then he rests 30 seconds between plays. Tailoring a workout that includes quick thrusts, such as snatch lifting of heavy free weights, might be appropriate, Retterer said.

But for someone in a constant motion sport such as cross-country or long-distance swimming, workouts that increase lung capacity, like jumping rope, might work better.

In nearly all instances, some type of strength conditioning is important.

“Speed will only get you so far these days, “ Edison track Coach Erich Moreno said. Moreno is also a personal trainer who has worked with several high-profile prep athletes in the county, such as current NBA player Cherokee Parks and Duke basketball player Chris Burgess. “To be on top, you have to be strong.”

Stuck said that’s exactly what happened when she began lifting weights several years ago.

“There are so many muscles to develop for water polo players that other athletes don’t have to worry about,” she said. “I find weightlifting very helpful for me. It toned me up and made my swimming and throwing [of the ball] better.”

Administrators and coaches are dealing with demands for more weight-training facilities as best they can.

Irvine Coach Scott Hinman has his swimmers train poolside because getting time in the Vaqueros’ crowded weight room is difficult.

Sophomore Stephanie Hsiao, a freestyle swimmer, says Hinman’s training methods, which include outdoor workouts with a medicine ball four times a week and strength training that includes stretching elastic cords, have helped her improve her times.

“We excel more at swimming through resistance training,” Hsiao said. “You can apply everything we do in these workouts when we are in the water.”

At Huntington Beach, Ciarelli has two weight rooms available--one for the general student population, with a host of generic workout machines and apparatus, and the other for athletes only, with Olympic-style free weights.

Aliso Niguel High, which has a waiting list for its four daily weightlifting classes, raised $12,000 during the summer and turned a storage room into a second weightlifting facility.

“From our standpoint, doing this was very important,” Wolverine Athletic Director Mike Middlebrook said. “It helps build a stronger foundation for all athletes and it means that they will be less likely to incur injuries, because they are stronger.”

Newport Harbor has four weight-training facilities.

“We have taken vacant spaces and added small bits and pieces of weight rooms,” Athletic Director Eric Tweit said. “We have a small one in the baseball team room, for instance. People believe in this training and they want to do it closer to their own facility.”

Esperanza, a county football power, has three weight rooms, each funded by different sports, according to instructor Bill Pendleton, an assistant football coach. Even at that, getting time to lift can be difficult.

“We double up sometimes,” Pendleton said.

La Quinta recently raised a majority of the $30,000 it needed to convert a former auto shop into its second weight room, Athletic Director Jim Perry said.

Chris Smith, a 6-foot-4, 205-pound senior forward on the Aztec boys’ basketball team, spends a lot of time in the new facility. Four years ago, he said, he was a chunky 5-foot-9 freshman who wasn’t very good defensively. But when he started to grow at the end of his sophomore year, he took to the weight room and now has more confidence than ever.

“It has really helped me with my rebounding and post moves,” he said. “And I can guard the big guys now because I’m stronger.”

San Clemente senior Colleen Turnbull, an all-county girls’ basketball selection last season, began training at a private weightlifting center last May to avoid crowds at school.

“I wanted to get stronger for college,” she said. “This prepares you for what is to come.”

Private facilities, noting that there is lucrative potential in providing a place to train for high school-age students, are filling the gaps when school weight rooms fall short or are overcrowded.

“This is a growing business,” said Retterer of IntenseCity, which charges up to $5,000 a year for individualized training. “We watch world-class athletes on TV with billions of dollars in athletic contracts and endorsements and they want to protect themselves with personal training. We have seen a lot of parents do anything they can to give their kid that same kind of competitive edge.”

Vick, of Sports Performance, said his company plans to expand here because, “Orange County is the best market for this kind of thing.”

“There is affluence, greater emphasis on education, people are looking to get college scholarships for their kids and there’s more participation in youth leagues,” he said. Mike McMahon, manager of 24-Hour Fitness in Huntington Beach, said he has noticed a dramatic increase over the last three years in the number of high school students taking memberships.

“I think parents dream of college sports for their kids and the kids know they have to make up deficits in size and strength to get to the next level,” he said. “They’re convinced it’s weight training.”

McMahon said his company plans to expand a popular Northern California weight training program for prep teams here soon. Team members would be allowed to lift weights at no cost during non-peak hours.

Veteran UC Irvine water polo Coach Ted Newland looks upon the latest weight-lifting rush with a smile. As early as 1955, when he was aquatics coach at Newport Harbor, he was encouraging weightlifting when few others were. A lot of people thought he was nuts, Newland said, but time has borne his ideas out.

“It pays to lift,” he says. “It increases the longevity of any player.”