From navigating COVID to keeping players hydrated, this man is crucial for Sporting KC
Rented bicycles, Walmart-bought blow-up ice baths and exercise bikes in hotel hallways.
That’s the life Sporting Kansas City is living while based at ESPN’s World Wide of Sports in Orlando for the MLS is Back Tournament.
The training conditions have been less than ideal not just for Sporting KC, but for all MLS teams since arriving in Florida.
Teams are limited to set times on the training fields and in the performance centers. If a positive COVID-19 test occurs for a team, as was the case with Kansas City recently, that entire team is barred from using the performance center for multiple days.
Despite the troubles, Joey Harty, Sporting Kansas City’s director of sports performance and science, has taken the challenging conditions in stride.
“We brought all of our own stuff down,” Harty said. “We brought all the weights ... anything that we need to run a resistance training session with our team.”
Each team was provided access to a ballroom upon arrival at the hotel. That space can be used for meetings and other team activities.
Kansas City? They’ve turned that space into a private gym that features cardio equipment, bikes, elliptical machines, treadmills, resistance-training equipment, squat racks and free weights.
“Actually it’s turned into a big blessing for us because we’ve gone ahead, and since we got that confirmed positive, we’re not allowed to be in our high-performance center until Wednesday at the earliest,” Harty said. “So we’ve utilized our training room, our weight room, four or five times since then.”
The ballroom-turned-gym is just one of the many efforts that Harty and his team have made to get Sporting’s players prepared for the tournament.
Kansas City will play at least three games in 11 days, and potentially more if it advances out of Group D. Until Sunday night, the club hadn’t played a game since March 7, a 4-0 home victory over the Houston Dynamo, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Harty ran a multitude of tests on the players before they flew down to Orlando, chief among them a sweat test to gauge their sweat concentration and sodium levels. Those tests, conducted in KC on days similar to Orlando in terms of temperature and humidity, were created to determine how much a player will sweat and how much sodium he’d retain.
If a player sweats a lot, he needs more water. If a player is losing a lot of sodium while sweating, he requires a higher sodium intake ahead of high-intensity workouts and games.
“You may have a guy who has a low sweat rate but a high sodium loss, and so you’re trying to focus on that guy,” Harty said. “Obviously (there’s a) baseline of water and general recommendations that we give the guys, but you need a little bit heavier sodium supplement prior to training and prior to games.”
And that critical piece of information is just a small part of what Harty employs to care for Sporting KC’s players during their stay in Orlando. He will keep track of their weight gains or losses, what kind of food they are eating, whether they’re drinking alcohol in their rooms and how many carbohydrates and antioxidants they’re consuming.
“We can also track their body weight over time because we’ve noticed it’s a good indicator of when guys are switching environments,” Harty said. “When we’re looking at entering a new environment, that’s another indication: bodyweight fluctuation.”
“(It’s) not babysitting, but it’s just things that we have to ask and try to be on top of. And again, if someone is under-eating, we can just continue to monitor that.”
Even with a high-performance center available and the private gym in the ballroom, Harty has still had to improvise along the way.
Upon arriving in Orlando, he rented out a squadron of bicycles from a bike bar. They allow players to cycle around the hotel facility for high-intensity cardiovascular workouts.
Only three players and a coach are allowed in th private gym at any one time, and all of them must be wearing masks if engaging in high-intensity workouts. To combat that, exercise bikes have been relocated to the hallway to allow players to exercise without a mask and free up some space.
Ice baths are not being provided by MLS or the hotel — they could be unsanitary, even after cleaning, because of possible COVID. Harty purchased his own inflatable pools from Walmart as a substitute.
“I would say from the medical side there was more stuff that we would have liked to bring down that we use more frequently,” he said. “Like our hyperbaric chambers are the perfect example — basically just a high-concentrated chamber of oxygen. But basically with everything that’s going on with the COVID situation, it’s not sanitary, so we’re having to keep guys away from each other.”
With one match down for Sporting KC, a late 2-1 defeat to Minnesota Sunday night, attention now turns to Friday’s game.
Players who played in Sunday night’s game enjoyed two days of rest and regeneration. On Tuesday, they spent a short time working out in the pool before spending the rest of the day having fun and socializing with soccer balls.
Those two days are called “game day plus-1” and game day plus-2.” The players who featured in the game will take it easy for a couple of days, while the players who did not follow an intense workout the following day.
“No matter the outcome of the game and how the game ends, I say, ‘OK, great, all of these guys are training with us tomorrow, all these guys are doing regen, and these guys are doing a modified session,’” Harty said. “And then we’ll talk about what the session is with the coaching staff.”
This story was originally published July 15, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "From navigating COVID to keeping players hydrated, this man is crucial for Sporting KC."