‘Roids All the
Rage
By Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz
With the recent testimonies by present and past major leaguers before Congress, Jose Canseco’s best-selling tell-all book, and a league where heads are getting fatter and balls are flying farther, it is time to address the pressures that baseball and other sports place on amateur athletes.
Even at a school like Lick-Wilmerding, where academics take priority and teachers have the authority to keep players from going to their games, the pressures of performance weigh heavy on the minds of athletes. From baseball to track and field, there is a pressure to hit the ball farther and record a faster time. While this drive is what gets athletes to the most elite levels, at an institution where only the very rare athlete even participates in competitive athletics in college it can be surprisingly overwhelming. Many coaches expect their players to be training all year round, whether through other sports or through workout regiments. Most fall sports have summer workouts aimed at giving players an edge in tryouts and against competition.
But often, when skill doesn’t cut it, particularly in the sports more focused on strength such as lacrosse, baseball, football and throwing in track and field, players need to separate themselves from their competition. Even though there is no steroid problem at Lick, in fact it would be shocking to see the use of illegal steroids at our school, it is a reality that Lick athletes use supplements to enhance their performance. These performance enhancers range from such simple energy boosters as a can of Red Bull before a game, to a serious creatine regiment. Creatine is a muscle-building supplement that paired with rigorous weight training, yields fantastic results. The long-term effects of the supplements are not well known, and as it absorbs an exorbitant amount of water, dehydration is a common side-affect. You can buy creatine at just about any dietary supplement store and it is not banned by any professional organizations.
But the use of creatine at the high school level marks a trend in all levels of athletic competition pushing players to be at their physical peak, even when they aren’t at their peak in skill. Take a recent Lick graduate. At Lick he was a creatine user, and in part the results of his creatine use made him on of the strongest and best players in the Bay Counties League. Now in college, where the competition is significantly more intense as athletes are vying for spots at top Division I colleges and even getting drafted, he says that illegal steroids are the norm among upper classmen. He was not specific about where players obtained the illegal steroids, but he did say that the pressure on the players led them to look for performance enhancers that increased their strength to impress those scouting their talents.
Since a school like Lick forces athletes to search for an edge, the pressures at other schools are enormous. The sport that puts the most pressure on young athletes is football, and Lick doesn’t even have a football team. The recent wave of teen suicides stemming from the depression caused by the unsafe use of steroids has caused many to focus their attention on youth leagues rather than the major leagues. However, many maintain that until testing is standard, strict and thorough at all levels of competition, starting in either middle school or high school, that athletes will be pushed to enhance their performance, whether by using illegal substances or not. The top-down approach used by Congress and Major League Baseball is not the most effective way of stopping the use of steroids amongst young athletes, but it is nonetheless a step in the right direction.
Paper Tiger
April 2005