Breakfast Club: Getting Better One Morning at a Time

As the Falcon’s football season ended, so did the various training sessions that took place early in the morning at Whitnall High School, better known by those who attended as "Breakfast Club."

When the new football coaching staff arrived at Whitnall, they needed to find a way to fit conditioning and lifting into the busy schedules of both themselves and spring sport athletes.  The solution was the creation of an hour-long conditioning and lifting circuit held for an hour before school started.

With little knowledge of the demeanor of the students at Whitnall, the coaches didn’t expect a huge turnout the first day. To their surprise more than 55 football athletes set their alarms and arrived bright and early to get stronger, faster, and more in shape then when they showed up.

Marcelo Munoz said Breakfast Club was “exhausting but worth it in the end.”

This trend continued throughout the rest of the school year and into the summer months as the number occasionally even got up into the 70s.

Even though these sessions were early, the players made the best of the time they were given to become better athletes. To add some fun to the 5 o’ clock starts, players were split up into companies and competed for daily points.  Companies such as Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot matched up against each other to see who was the fastest, strongest, and mentally fit team in the morning. 

As Breakfast Club continued in the summer, more and more people started to arrive.  Soon there were student athletes from all different sports showing up to show “their stuff.”  In addition to football players, members of the softball, basketball, volleyball, and the cheer and dance teams showed up for the early start. 

“This program got me in really good shape overall,” soccer player Gabbie Weis said.

The workouts consisted of three circuits throughout the majority of the year. This included lifting in the weight room, conditioning and agility in the gym, and abs in the hallway. The time in the weight room focused on a specific muscle group, but because the players were short on time, many of them had to speed through their repetitions and sets. The conditioning portion usually had some type of sprinting workout that tested how far each person was willing to push themselves to get better. This station included ladders which helped each athlete increase their quickness in their feet.

Lastly was the abs station where coaches challenged each person to get as strong as they possibly could in the abdominal regions of the body.  At the abdominal station, athletes would also compete in various challenges to gain company points. These challenges included, fireman carry, tug a war, and bear crawl races.  At the end of each quarter, teams would be rewarded for their victories through football apparel and other prizes.

Overall student athletes were challenged every step of the way to get better and it often showed in the outcome of the football season.