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USL Phoenix Rising FC

Beating the Heat

August 3, 2016 - United Soccer League Championship (USL)
Phoenix Rising FC News Release


Arizona United defender Adam West has been a professional soccer player since 2007. He's played in seven different cities across the country and played in nearly 100 professional games. But in his debut match for Arizona United on June 25, he barely made it through the first 60 minutes.

The game hadn't changed. The environment that he found himself in, however, was drastically different.

On that night, it was 108 degrees.

This is where team trainer Tyler Sullivan comes in. Part of his job includes helping players like West get acclimated to the intense Arizona heat. The biggest problem he faces is making sure players are drinking enough water, even when they don't want to.

"A lot of players don't want to drink water because they don't think they are sweating," Sullivan said. "That's not the case though because the sweat is just evaporating off their bodies because of the low humidity here."

The lack of sweat allows players to believe they are not fully exerting themselves during training, which means they push their bodies further in the intense heat. So Sullivan is constantly walking back and fourth from the water coolers, where he fills up water bottles, back to the field where players eagerly anticipate the next water break.

Sullivan uses required weigh-ins to show players the physical ramifications of playing at a high intensity without proper hydration. He weighs the players before practice, measures how much they drink during practice, and then weighs them again following practice. Take away the weight from water added by drinking, and Sullivan figures out and then shows the players how much weight they've lost during a training session. The players have the opportunity to actually see the effects of not properly hydrating.

While players may be aware of the common dangers of dehydration, such as heat exhaustion or stroke, they may not know that dehydration can lead to unsafe weight loss. Sullivan says he has seen players loose up to five pounds in one 90-minute training session.

This extreme weight loss can be mentally and physically damaging to players. If an athlete loses one percent of their body weight during physical activity, they experience minimal performance decreases like the inability to reach tops speeds while also remaining agile.

At two percent, a player experiences significant performance decreases where even mental capacities can be compromised.

"Basically, decision making starts to go down hill," Sullivan said. "Not only are you playing badly because you are dehydrated but now you're making bad decisions on the field because you are dehydrated."

For many players, getting their bodies acclimated to the heat is simply a matter of time and learning how to handle consistently high temperatures. In certain instances, the training staff helps players by giving them salt tablets, which gives a player a boost of sodium to help the muscles better absorb the water they drink. When muscles are better absorbing water, a player is less likely to cramp up.

Regardless of how long a player has trained in high temperatures, Sullivan still has to monitor every United player, even those that grew up in the Valley.

Arizona native Jordan Stagmiller has spent much of his life playing soccer in temperatures well over 100 degrees, but some days the heat is more unbearable than others.

"This has actually been one of the hottest summers that I have lived through, at least in my opinion," Stagmiller said. "Add those days where you have the humidity so you go out there and it is 110 plus the humidity and you just go, 'What are we doing?' We're cooking in an oven. "

Stagmiller has seen several players make their way into the Arizona landscape, each thinking they are prepared for extreme heat. He's found that is rarely ever the case.

"New guys head into it thinking they know about the dry heat, but then you come here and experience it and they have no idea what is going on," Stagmiller said. "A lot of guys take it lightly but they don't really know what it feels like until you've actually been here for it. So it takes guys weeks, months to really get the body use to it."

West can confirm that. The defender has been playing with Arizona since mid June but his body has still not fully adjusted to his new environment.

"It's taken longer then I thought to get use to this, but I am getting more acclimated," West said. "I've already noticed a difference between my first game and my last game."

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