Aug. 20, 2007

Boston, Mass. - You couldn't blame Danielle Tenaglia for being a bit nervous last week, her first as a freshman on the women's soccer team at Stony Brook University on Long Island.

Sure, she's comfortable on the pitch, having scored 35 goals during an all-scholastic junior year at North Reading High. But last week, she had to pass four different conditioning tests on the first day of practice, all before she even started competing for playing time with 18 returning players and 11 other freshmen.

She is not alone among Division 1 freshmen, or any prospective college athlete, who regularly find themselves in a different league in terms of conditioning almost the moment they graduate from high school.

"For high school [soccer], I would wait until August, maybe run a couple miles every day. . . . It's kind of not even comparable," Tenaglia said. "I was expecting that, from what I've heard. At the Division 1 level, the preseason is very tough."

Tenaglia is facing another challenge. She is coming off a complete tear of the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee, which required surgery and cost her all of her senior season.

"Coming back at first was mentally tough, because you always have that thought in the back of your mind," Tenaglia said. "You just have to kind of let go of it and just play."

Now, after extensive physical therapy and rehabilitation -- capped off by an intense summer day-by-day regimen, detailed in a packet and required by Stony Brook's coaches -- Tenaglia couldn't be more prepared to do just that.

In recent years, players' programs have become sport-specific, so though they all combine the same components -- weightlifting, core strength, speed and agility, conditioning, and nutritional guidelines -- the breakdown is different.

While Tenaglia might run (especially interval training) four or five days a week, Shannon might run three and do an extra day in the weight room.

"A couple of years ago, we would just say to them, 'Just be fit when you come in,' " said Sue Ryan, Stony Brook's 23-year head women's soccer coach. "They'd go out and run 10 miles, thinking that would prepare them for soccer."

But now, they know much better, and Ryan, her assistants, and Stony Brook's strength and conditioning specialists coauthor the weightlifting and fitness packet, which she said continually gets "more specific to the demands of the game" -- so much so that goalies get an entirely separate packet.

But the goal is the same: endurance, strength, and injury prevention, all in time to get the most out of the NCAA's strictly sanctioned practice dates.

In order to gauge a players' readiness when they arrive at camp, it's common for teams to have conditioning tests the first day, and Stony Brook's test consists of a 1 1/2-mile run, a 300-yard shuttle (a series of 25-yard runs), a 40-yard sprint, and something known as a "beep test," which involves reaching various cones in sync with a previously recorded, accelerating series of beeps. Required times are based upon previous performances, but all freshmen start out against one standard.

Ryan said she knows it's not even possible for all of her players, especially freshmen, to follow her workouts to a T, but those who don't pass the tests don't receive their uniforms in time for the team's first scrimmage.

"That's pretty severe, because you let other people get in ahead of you," Ryan said. "We're rewarding the hard work very directly."

Tenaglia hoped to get that reward last Wednesday, when Stony Brook held its tests only three days before the one-year anniversary of her ACL surgery. While playing at an Olympic Development Program camp last July, Tenaglia took one awkward stride while running, severing her ACL and damaging her meniscus.

"The recruiting process was difficult, because I couldn't play my senior year," Tenaglia said, "so my recruiting was based upon my junior year."

That wasn't a bad thing to base it upon, because she did score those 35 goals to lead the Hornets to a 16-1-4 season. But some coaches were reluctant to offer a scholarship to a player with such a severe injury.

That was also the case at Stony Brook, where she will start out with just a half scholarship, but Ryan took a special interest in Tenaglia, who signed in December, the same month she began rehabilitation at High Performance Sports Center in Peabody. (She had undergone physical therapy at Harmeling Physical Therapy in North Reading.)

"Right from the first day, I did my evaluation on her, she was driven and ready to go right there," said Eric Ekelund, the director of rehab at High Performance. Tenaglia said she was "working my knee every day of the week."

"Once she started gaining her confidence," Ekelund said, "there was really no stopping her."

Rehab consisted of Sportsmetrics, a trademarked, plyometrics-based regimen designed to strengthen leg muscles and prevent knee injuries in women. Once she was back to normal, about eight months after the surgery, she transitioned into the training packet sent to her by Ryan, which called for gradually intensifying workouts throughout the summer.

She still works out three times a week at High Performance, under the watch of director of programs Joe Colotti and alongside a dozen or so other collegiate soccer players.

"A lot of them do have programs that their coaches do give them; however, a lot of times athletes over the summer find it difficult to do conditioning work on their own," Colotti said. "So what they do is they come here and they get a big chunk of what their coach is expecting. . . . Nine times out of 10, a lot of the stuff the coach is looking for, we're doing as well."

Tenaglia has also gotten back on the soccer field, playing for her club teams, the Spirit of Massachusetts and the Boston Aztecs, and at the same Olympic Development Program camp where she was injured last year.

Now, Tenaglia can even look at the ordeal as a positive: It gave her a career goal, as she plans to major in health science and aspires to become a physician's assistant specializing in knee orthopedics.

As for her knee, it's holding up fine.

"I haven't had, knock on wood, any problems with it," she said. "It's as strong as it's ever been right now."

So, too, is Tenaglia.