This season, Riverside Brookfield High School’s football team has been trying something new to help its players: yoga.
Stephanie Roldan, who owns and works out of The Treehouse, a wellness and fitness cooperative at 1 Riverside Road in downtown Riverside, has been running yoga sessions for the high school’s varsity football team this season after practices.
A yoga instructor and wellness educator for 11 years, Roldan said the initiative has a myriad of benefits for the team’s teenage athletes.
“These kids’ bodies can get overworked so quickly and so easily, and it can ruin their entire season,” she told the Landmark. “You can use the parts of yoga that work well for sports — the focus, the breath work, the mobility — to enhance strength and agility and help injury prevention and their focus.”
The instructor said the practice is “not new to elite sports,” with legendary athletes like LeBron James and Walter Payton having supplemented their trainings with yoga, but it’s “definitely newer to high school and anyone younger.”
While some may think the calmness of yoga contradicts the intensity of sports training, Roldan said it actually complements it.
“It’s not the same-old, ‘I’m benching 250 pounds.’ It is softer,” she said. “It’s such a neat thing to see them calmer and quieter and focusing on their bodies. I get a lot of kids with questions: ‘My hips hurt so bad. What do you think with this?’ We do a lot of mobility for hip movement so that they can move better, back to injury prevention. But also, if they get a bigger stride, and I can get my hips to go wider, then I can get a faster [running] pace, and I actually get better.”
Roldan said she was brought on to help the team after sending her own children as teenage athletes to Hustle Hard, a sports training facility in North Riverside. She said one of the owners, Nick Santos, who had worked with the varsity football team at RB, contacted her to add in mobility training for the players.
“Last spring, we tried it once, just to see how it would go over with the football players, and it was so neat to see,” Roldan said. “I did a flexibility test. I was like, ‘I’m going to try to get you a little lower in your toe reach’ … If you can picture, I had them sit on the ground and reach toward their toes.”
Some might laugh at the image, but Roldan said the exercise was successful and represented the proof in the pudding.
“I said, ‘Now, we’re going to do a bunch of stretches made to elongate the muscles in the backs of your legs and your hips and see if we can’t get any change,’” she said. “I had a couple of kids who actually freaked out. They were like, ‘Oh my God, how did you do that?’ It was really cute because they were very sincere. I was like, ‘It’s not magic!’ It’s so neat to be able to educate that way.”
Roldan gave kudos to Sam Styler, RB’s football coach, for allowing the program to move forward. She said the school’s volleyball coach, Caitlin Staib-Lipinski, had recently asked her to bring her lessons to the volleyball team, too.
“Starting this past off-season, we were kicking around the idea. As summer camp started approaching, we met with Stephanie, and she laid out her plan and thought process and how she works with athletes,” Styler said. “She’s worked with numerous high school athletes in the area. We figured, what better way to help our guys out than bringing in a yoga instructor? It’s something I don’t think many football coaches aren’t equipped to do.”
Styler said the benefits have been evident in the short time since bringing Roldan on.
“You can see the way that our boys are able to move their bodies and the flexibility in their hips, which is extremely important in the game of football,” he said. “Also, the way the team has come together in this process. They’re so used to having their loud football coaches scream and yell, trying to get them fired up. To have a nice, calming voice to come in and work with them very intently … Day in and day out, they always ask, ‘Is today yoga day?’”
Roldan said the exercises act as a form of bonding for the team.
“You’re doing these weird poses together, and you’re all taking a nap together in the middle of school. It does promote bonding inadvertently,” she said. “I tell them, ‘I’m not here to preach at you. I’m not here to teach you how to stand on your head. I’m here to teach you to listen to your body.’”
She said she was grateful to give the players more space for mindfulness and rest in the form of shavasana, also known as the corpse pose — in which you lay flat on your back and rest for several minutes — in addition to the flexibility benefits of other poses.
“Especially more elite athletes are go-go-go-go-go. They are at school all day, then they go to practice, then they go to lifting, and then they have homework,” Roldan said. “I worked at Lurie Children’s for 13 years as a developmental therapist, so I know that our bodies need to stop. Shavasana gives us permission to stop. I try to give them a good three-to-five-minute shavasana because it gives them a minute to just be.”
