Going the Distance
Posted on December 17, 2024 by Marketing and Communications
TOWARD THE END of the Texas State game, Jags midfielder Juliana Lopes had to pull quickly back to defend. It was a big game against a conference rival near the end of the season. One physically fit team against another.
“My head was saying, ‘Let’s go,’” Lopes says, “but my legs were not letting me run as fast.”
At the end of the game, “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I need to look at the GPS data.’”
Team members wear tracking devices that measure performance. Lopes had run 9.1 miles that day — the most any Jags soccer player ran at a conference game this season. (Right back Sydney Magliocca tied the distance in a nonconference match.)
Athletes in few sports come close to matching the distances run by soccer players. A basketball point guard? About two miles. The 10K (6.2 miles) is the longest cross country distance, though warm-ups and cooldowns push those runners over the 10-mile mark.
It’s not unusual for Jag soccer athletes to log 6, 7, 8 miles on game day. Of Lopes’ 9.1 miles, all but 1.7 came during the game. Midfielders tend to cover the most ground, and Lopes says she had to play wide against Texas State, spreading the field and increasing her distance during the Oct. 24 defensive battle. She stopped and started more than 4,200 times that day and hit a max speed of nearly 17 mph.
Oh, and she had to kick a ball.
“She is going to cover nine miles,” says Katie Forage, director of athletic performance for soccer and volleyball. “But she also has to sprint. She also has to accelerate. She also has to decelerate. She has to change her direction. She has to fight off defenders. She has to jump. She has to do all these different things.”
Forage has to prepare players for all those demands on their bodies. That means squats, jumps, sprints and weight lifting. Pulling and pushing. Chin-ups, core work and single calf raises.
The day after Texas State, for Lopes, recovery included an ice bath.