A couple of
years ago I picked up a book called One
Great Game by Don Wallace, it was about a game about De la Salle High
School from Concord California against Long Beach Ploy high school from Long
Beach California. The account of the De La Salle program left me amazed and
wanted to know more. For those of you that don’t follow it De La Salle owns the
record for consecutive wins at 151 games. I also saw them on a nationally televised
game against a far superior team and they were amazing with their quickness. A
year or two later I found another book on a year with the De La Salle program When
the Game Stands Tall by Neil Hayes, a man named Mike Blasquez who was their
athletic trainer and conditioning coach figured prominently in the book. This
last weekend I met Mike Blasquez who is now the head strength and conditioning
coach at University of California Berkeley. We went to dinner and talked for
three hours on training. The two things that stuck the me the most about what
he did at De La Sale was that the incoming ninth graders spend a year acquiring
what I call foundational strength, the ability to handle and control their bodyweight.
The second thing was they continued to work two to three days a week in-season
and continued to do significant speed development work in-season. It is always
fun to meet professionals like this; you bet I am going to watch the Cal
programs because with this man’s influence they certainly will be more
athletic.
