ARCADIA SPORTS PAGE ARCADIA SPORTS PAGE Page 60 July 2012 By Milton Herman Arcadia head basketball coach Luke Neibling has resigned and will take over the coaching duties at Sandra Day O’Connor High School. Neibling leaves on an extremely high note. In three years as the varsity head coach, his teams compiled a 70-18 record and reached the state semi fi nals last year. “I have enjoyed great relationships with Arcadia administration, faculty and staff, parents, my coaching staff, and especially the players,” Neibling said. Arcadia principal John Biera has known Neibling since before he became the basketball coach. “Overall he’s a great guy, great person, great family man,” Biera said. O’Connor is classi fi ed as a D1 school and opened in 2003. The Eagles posted a 27-45 overall record in the last three years. The north Glendale school offered Neibling the head coach position as well as a full-time teaching job. Neibling’s sole responsibility was coaching duties while at Arcadia. “The opportunity to teach and coach at the same school will be very bene fi cial to my career and my family,” Neibling said. The coaching search for the Titans will now begin. Biera said a committee of parents and community members, headed by athletic director Kevin Mooney, will select the new coach. “With a high-pro fi le job like this one, there’s no telling who is going to come out of the woodwork and apply for it,” Biera said. Neibling said he believes the success at Arcadia will continue. “I do not doubt for a second that the Arcadia administration, with the leadership of John Biera and Kevin Mooney, will fi nd a great candidate to replace me and continue the great Arcadia basketball tradition that has been built in recent years,” Neibling said. Arcadia basketball coach moves west Summer weighted to help lift football team thru season By Nathan Humpherys Though many of their classmates might still be asleep at 8 a.m. on a hot summer morning, the Arcadia football team is already at work in the gym, warming up before a two-hour lifting session. Most of the players are clad in grey t-shirts which read, “We’ve been weighting for this all year.” “When people come on Friday night and see a game, they don’t know about all this,” coach Jim Ellison said. “They think you just show up and play a two-hour game and you go, but we do this year-round.” Ellison is a big believer in weightlifting and its bene fi ts. He spent a combined 16 years on the coaching staffs at Chaparral and Pinnacle high schools and feels the success of those programs started with the work they did in the weight room. “It makes them stronger, it de fi nitely reduces injuries, it de fi nitely builds their con fi dence,” he said. “And then (there’s) the camaraderie. They’re together all the time.” When Ellison arrived at Arcadia four years ago, 28 players participated in the summer lifting program. “Before, it was, ‘Hey, if I show up at weight lifting, I show up,’” Ellison said. Not anymore. The team starts lifting in January, and everyone, from incoming freshman to returning varsity starters, participates. There’s even a separate, early-afternoon session for players who have summer school. The change in Arcadia High School football culture is re fl ected by the number (105 this year) and attitudes of participants. Returning varsity players such as Trent Wilson and Payson Kendle not only put the work in themselves, they also check up on teammates who miss lifting sessions. “It’s one of the biggest things for our season, is just making sure everybody’s lifting in here, and lifting as a team” Kendle said. Both he and Wilson have participated in the program since they were freshmen and have seen the bene fi ts on and off the fi eld. “It makes you more con fi dent that you can compete with the bigger teams like Saguaro,” Wilson said. “It helps you so that you don’t feel like they’re above you, because you’re working just as hard as they are in the weight room.” The program is focused on more than increasing con fi dence and athletic performance, though. The team also places a heavy emphasis on injury prevention. For the fi rst several weeks, coaches focus on making sure players are using proper form while lifting, to make sure they get the full bene fi t of the lift and to protect their knees and backs. During warm-ups, players stretch to increase fl exibility in their shoulders, hips and core. Last season, the team was largely free from many common football injuries, and Ellison attributed much of that to the work done in the weight room. There were several shoulder injuries, though, so this year, the team has implemented several routines focused on increasing shoulder stability and fl exibility. While general conditioning helps prevent injuries, the team regularly implements lifts and routines targeted at strengthening areas which are more prone to injury in an effort to keep players healthy through the season. “We even go as far as we have wrist drills, to build their wrists up, because I’ve had guys snap a wrist back,” Ellison said. Golfer’s drive: get Titans back into state tournament By Nathan Humpherys With his freckles, good-natured grin and tufts of red hair poking out from under his cap, Arcadia golfer Jake Wiley looks an awful lot like a young Ron Howard. A lanky Richie Cunningham who can drive the ball 300 yards with accuracy. Wiley started taking golf lessons at his parent’s country club when he was 5. He shot his fi rst birdie when he was seven, and as a 13-year-old, he beat his dad for the fi rst time. “I made sure he knew it,” Wiley said. It may have been the fi rst time father lost to son, but they both knew it wouldn’t be the last. “He was telling me, ‘I’m starting to worry about this, because I don’t want to lose every time now, but I know it’s coming,’ ” Jake said. He now defeats his dad on a regular basis. His dad isn’t the only one to hear about it after a loss. Wiley and a teammate recently won a heated match against two friends who golf for Brophy and made the losers buy dinner. In July, Wiley will play in a tournament for a chance to qualify for the junior masters. He’s won an interclub championship tournament at Paradise Valley and placed second in several other tournaments. His sophomore year he played on the Arcadia team which competed for the state championship, though the team fell short by one match last year, when Wiley was a junior. He’s no stranger to tough competition, especially since he’s Arcadia’s number- one golfer. “I don’t get too nervous over anything, but it’s the random shots. I’ll have like a 5-foot birdie putt, and those will kill me,” he said. “But say that was for a par, that’d be easy. You know, ice in my veins. But the 5-foot birdie putt just gets me every time. The putter starts shaking, and I have to back off.” When his nerves are a little on edge, Wiley tries to take his mind off of golf, usually by starting a conversation with the people he’s playing with. He also doesn’t like to know what his opponents are shooting so he can focus on his game instead of trying to match their scores. For his senior year, Wiley hopes to help the Titans back into the state tournament and that Arcadia places in the top 10 when it competes with many of the bigger golf schools in the Dobson Ranch Invitational. And if the Titans thump the Brophy Broncos in the process, then it will certainly be Happy Days indeed.