The Tragedy of the Weekly Cap

[Phil 5,129]

The Tragedy of the Weekly Cap

 

 

Strasmore has been quite "active" (as some VHLians would say) since his arrival on the VHL scene. For those that do not know, "activity" in the VHL community is linked with "Practice Hours". Essentially, you are active if you are engaging in numerous hours of practice each week. Though there is a weekly cap on the number of training hours one can accumulate in a week, Strasmore has been hitting it almost every week. 

 

"It feels good to put my focus into my training. I always trained hard since High School, but it is different now. I train and play hockey mostly to take my mind off the terrible injury I had when I played football. At first, I did not understand why I was limited with the amount of hours I could practice and train in a week but it was my agent, Phil Knight, who explained it to me. It kind of makes sense now."

 

Tragedy in sports is not solely owned by Strasmore. In fact, the VHL has a very dark spot in the tragedy zone. Not many people know of it, but here's the brief story of what happened to cause us limiting the amount of training one gets in a week:

 

Drugs and alcohol are usually a problem among young athletes, which always stems from addiction. They also do not go super well with sports, especially in a sport where they are played on knives. For the privacy of the family, we will omit the players name, but let's go back to Season 3 of the VHL, where a young upcoming player was not only struggling with addiction problems, but trying to be the best player the game has ever seen. 

 

His coaches first noticed problems when they would see him every single day in the gym. It did not matter what time they came in, 9:00am, 7:00am, 5:00am, 4:00am... there he would be, sweating and working out, stretching, doing yoga or meditation, but always practicing. 

 

The coach one day after seeing that the young player did not have a lot of energy after the practice, called his captain over to ask him to keep an eye of for him. The captain said he would report back to him at the end of the week. He was asked not to follow to closely, so as it to not be too obvious. 

 

At the end of the week, the captain told the coach his findings. The captain said he would always leave the team's gym for the night around 10:00pm, and the young'un would still be doing some workout or meal prep, or other activity. He never seemed to rest. 

 

This was alarming to the coach, because as we already said, the player would already be in the gym whenever any of the coaching staff arrived in the morning. The coach asked security to pull the tapes from the gym for the last 2 weeks. What he found was shocking:

 

The player never left the gym, or fitness centre. He never went outside, except once a day where it looked like he changed into running-wear and so it was clear when he came back all sweaty that he had been for a run. He was clearly all-consumed by his training and did nothing else, except when the team's games took place. 

 

Digging deeper, he got permission to view tapes from one other VHL's cities hotel they stayed at when they played there. Again, he was always in the fitness centre, which was 24-hours, meditating, working out, practicing. 

 

The coach, deeply troubled, called his player into his office the next day to find out why. The player only shrugged it off, saying he was fine, but just working hard and wanting to be the best. His coach warned him that his body needs time to recover, to which the player just told him he knows it but that was what the meditation was for. 

 

His coaching staff, his teammates, even the team owner, tried to intervene, but the player wouldn't listen. He showed up to every single game, he was improving, and he passed all his physical and mental acuity tests the league laid out for him. So eventually the coach had to relent.

 

However, 3 months later, with the trade deadline approaching, the player was found dead in the gym by the cleaning staff at 3:02am. The autopsy showed he had died of  sudden cardiac trauma. The team and the commissioners all agreed to keep this as quiet as possible out of respect for the family. 

 

At that point, the league instituted a strict weekly cap on practice hours. Instead of truly saying why they did so, they had a group of scientists write a peer reviewed article on the impact of the lack of recovery on professional athletes, with the findings including sudden cardiac arrest, shutdown of the body's CNS, and dehydration-related stroke. 

 

We still do not really know all the details, but in case you were wondering why there is a limit - if you ask the league, they will say it's just for the players' own safety. But a deeper dive finds it's to protect the players from addiction - addiction to training and as the VHL Community said "TPE whoring". 

 

 

 

 

885 words

[Ricer13 2,824]

The addiction is still very real. 

[Gustav 6,469]

Imagine the absolute madness we'd see if we just...removed the cap. 2019 me would never have left the house.

[Tetricide 695]

And, thus, the VHL Blitz was born out of pure adoration and inspiration of the unsung player. Where absolute cracked-out-of-their-minds (and bodies) rejected players were accepted with open arms. Need a player with a 200 mph slapshot that burns through the net and breaks the plexiglass and catches an opposing defenseman unaware by breaking his stick over their head in celebration? What about a roid-raged defenseman that suplexes an opposing forward into the stands? Where just about anything goes, truly dedicated players with well over 10,000 TPE to the sport found their utopia.