BOB PADECKY: Athletes, like all of us, have to sacrifice

It has all the accoutrements, if the kids decided to look at it that way. They have their own bed, television, cellphone, internet. Three home-cooked meals a day. Showers. Wear whatever they want. Jammies all day if the mood suits them. The pets, too, good therapy. Burp if you want. Whatever. Ain’t no one else around except other burpees.

Celebrated chef Martha Stewart had most of that when she was in jail. It was called by some as “Camp Cupcake.” I like to think of it as “Celebrity Prison” and of course teenagers aren’t the only ones experiencing such isolation. We all are. We all are taking a finger flicking our lips up and down in the tedium.

The teenage athlete, however, presents a special skill set. Hormones are a raging, blazing condition present in all of that age but especially those who use sports to ventilate and let the steam out of their kettle. Physiologically they are all dressed up and ready to go.

But go where? Celebrity Prison? School is shut down so their team is shut down. No surreptitious gatherings. This isn’t the fun game of “Catch me if you can.” Parks are closed. Fields are closed. The only grass kids can run on today is the lawn in front of their house, if they have a lawn. The teenage athlete has no one to play with and no place to play. Shelter-in-place becomes stress-in-place. What’s a coach to do? How to dial down all those hormonal sparks?

“I try to tell them,” said Petaluma baseball coach Jim Selvitella, “this is a sacrifice their generation is making to make the world a better place.”

Help control the spread of the coronavirus. Isolate. Stay in Celebrity Prison. It’s not a lifetime sentence. OK? Chill. It will happen. But the future for a teenager isn’t what they see five years from now.

“Their brain doesn’t think that far ahead,” said Margaret Fitzgerald, Cloverdale’s softball coach. To the weekend? That’s their long view. Soon, they’ll be forced to extend that view.

“If you haven’t seen the handwriting on the wall,” Fitzgerald said, “spring sports areover.”

So again I ask - What is a coach to do?

“I emailed them with two questions,” said Jon Schwan, the coach of Montgomery’s boys soccer team. “?‘What does the game mean to you? And what are you going to do on your own? I’m not going to your house and drag you out of your bed.’?”

Schwan is testing his kids for motivation and self-discipline. How much do they love soccer? How much are they willing to work at what they love - if in fact they love it? The answer to both reveals much to the coach about the player.

“Improvise. Adjust. Overcome.” That Marine Corps motto is not just for soldiers on the battlefield. Not now. Now, it’s for all of us, and nowhere is that more in play than teenage athletes with energy to burn. Every youth coach knows it’s imperative to lead by example, otherwise the coach has lost the team.

Selvitella lives in Petaluma. His daughter Madi, pregnant with her first child, lives nearby. The other day Jim and his wife, Tammy, walked to their daughter’s house to see how she was doing.

“Madi was on the porch and we stayed on the sidewalk,” Selvitella said. “It was breaking my wife’s heart. She so wanted to go up to her and hug her. So much. But she couldn’t.”

Selvitella leads by example. So does Fitzgerald.

“I don’t know what to do with myself after 3 p.m.,” said Fitzgerald, referring to when her players begin to assemble for practice. “I can clean my house for so much. My stomach is in knots over this. I had my team for a full four days. Four days. Didn’t play one game. I get a call that school is out. I couldn’t even meet with my team to tell them. No goodbye meeting? Are you kidding me?”

Fitzgerald said she has been a softball coach for 30 years. Talk about taking the long view. That’s a heavy clock on her shoulders. With more softball behind her than ahead of her. So also she feels the tick-tick-tick like her kids. It’s a different tick, of course, but the concept of time now becomes the partner that follows us everywhere. The invisible enemy to a society that until now has moved at a frenetic pace, occupying every second it seems with movement, either between the ears or, for the athlete, between the lines.

“My daughter is 15 and plays the sport,” Schwan said. “She sprints down the street, runs around the block. We have a four-story parking garage near us. I wouldn’t be surprised if some kids have used it.”

Schwan asks his kids to perform some standard soccer drills. He lays down a ladder on his driveway. His daughter steps in-and-out of each rung as fast as she can to improve footwork. It’s a good agility drill.

“But nothing takes the place of competition,” Schwan said.

Time is now the competition. We all are competing against a silent but relentless opponent. The unique task for the teenage athlete is to beat an opponent that doesn’t have a number or an uniform. It doesn’t take a day off or even a minute. It doesn’t fatigue or ask for a time out. Never gets hurt or takes a water break.

In that the teenage athlete can be the inspiration. They can show the adults the way. If they can be much more than we give them credit for, if they can accept and handle the challenge, wouldn’t that be their greatest victory?

Because the winner would be all of us. A family. A team. A real team. In the best sense.