With the NFL and USA Football teaming up to bring steroid and supplement education to the forefront of the youth football conversation, Dr. Linn Goldberg of Oregon Health & Science University provided a presentation to attending youth and high school football coaches and administrators during the first day of the 2010 NFL/USA Football Youth Football Summit in Canton, Ohio.
"They actually had to stop the questions," Goldberg said of the question and answer session that followed his talk. "I think [the coaches] had a lot of interest and a lot of questions, so that was great."
During his approximately hour-long speech, Goldberg touched on everything from the composition of a steroid to why steroids are so appealing to today's youth and high school athletes.
"One [reason] is role model use, I think body image and how images are portrayed today is different - more hypomuscularity," Goldberg said. "There's peer pressure to use and perform in sports, and those are very important issues, and then body image is another problem. We have these body images that we think we can achieve at earlier and earlier ages, so people want to be like Hercules or Superman. They want to look the part.
"If you look at magazines, that's what fuels some of that in the media messages. And just some of the ads that seem innocent enough saying 'products on steroids,' like this is your car on steroids, this is your toothbrush on steroids. Things that are 'on steroids' are bigger, better and this sort of dummies down the message that steroids can be very harmful, especially for adolescents."
Still, with steroids and supplements education a prevalent topic throughout sports, many involved continue to overlook the issue.
"Most coaches - there's a halo around many of their kids," Goldberg said. "When we did a survey of coaches, as you might expect, they said steroids weren't a problem at their school, it was a problem at other schools, so everybody pointed the finger at other schools but not their own. They tended to have more of a halo around their kids than those in other places, so if every coach says it's really not a problem here, then nobody thinks that they need to do anything. If you don't think you have a problem, you don't recognize the problem because sometimes it's not recognizable. Then you won't do anything about it, you won't be proactive."
In the effort to change the culture surrounding steroids and supplements, accomplished medical professionals like Goldberg are doing their part to equip coaches and administrators with the knowledge necessary to influence their players to develop their bodies and their abilities in a natural way.
"That's why we developed our two programs - ATLAS and ATHENA - to give coaches the tools to be able to change the course and teach kids sports nutrition and training that they can use not only just for that specific sport - they may be playing other sports as well - and giving them life skills," Goldberg said. "So it provides a reasonable alternative for many of the kids and influences them not to use."
ATLAS and ATHENA are not limited to steroids and supplements education.
"It uses team pressure not to use - not just in steroids but other drugs and alcohol as well," Goldberg said. "For instance, we teach that alcohol is a muscle toxin in that if you had a muscle toxin, you would become weaker. That wouldn't be helping your team out, so if you're binge drinking on the weekend and your team knows it, then they know that you're not helping the team out by taking something that would hurt them. It's not about a morality issue, it's being as good as you can be. If you want to win and you have goals and teams have goals that are similar, they'll want to win. And so if they see somebody doing something that hurts them, they're less likely to go along with it."
Dennis Fowlkes, Head Coach at Columbus (Ohio) East High School and former West Virginia Mountaineers and Minnesota Vikings linebacker, was on hand for Goldberg's talk and came away impressed.
"I like what he said about steroids and supplements in general," Fowlkes said. "He said the one thing about supplements is you never know what's in them. They tell you there's 100% this in them and the next day they're causing cancer. The ATLAS program is all natural - showing you how to eat the right foods, the proper foods put together to get the correct proteins to build a strong body healthily."
Playing professionally in the 1980's and now coaching, Fowlkes can appreciate the advances made in steroids and supplements education as much as anyone.
"From my era, I played back in the '80s, I think now we have more knowledge of the steroids and more knowledge of the supplements we're using," he said. "I think now they are testing and getting the steroids and the supplements on the state level to find out exactly what's in these drugs that we're trying to give to our athletes. We used to just look at the short-term testing of new products, and short term doesn't really give you a lot of information. I think now we're looking at the long-term effects, and when you get the long-term effects, you find out that the drug or supplement you're using or the steroid is causing the body more harm now over the long term."
While knowledge of steroids, supplements and their effects on youth and high school athletes is at an all-time high, the culture of youth sports in general may need some attention as well - a task that rests out of the hands of medical professionals like Goldberg and in the hands of football people like Fowlkes.
"We probably put a little bit too much pressure on our high school kids to do well in sports," Fowlkes said. "You definitely want to win a scholarship to any college - it's a stepping stone to further your education. I think that's what we need to emphasize more. ... After that if you're blessed enough to go to the NFL, that's a blessing you receive. But I think we put too much emphasis on performing and competing now and that drives a high school athlete to say 'Well I've got to be the best I can, and to get there faster is to go to supplement drugs and steroids.'"
Thanks to programs like ATLAS and ATHENA, that method of thinking is on its way to becoming a thing of the past.
