By Bob Nuse, Sports Editor
Darius Young grew up in Princeton and has seemingly always been a part of the sports landscape.
A versatile athlete who graduated from Princeton High School in 1988, Young has coached basketball at both Princeton High and Princeton Day School, while he also worked as a personal trainer in the area. He still holds the Princeton High school record for points in a basketball season with 614.
For the past 10 years, Young has been the strength and conditioning coach at Princeton Day, working with young athletes who participate in a variety of sports. This fall, Young plans to branch out and offer speed and agility training for any area athletes who are interested.
Young, through Victory Sports, will be offering 23 sessions of Speed and Agility Training at Grover Park in Princeton. The sessions, which will be offered on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, as well as Saturday mornings, will run through Oct. 22. Interested athletes from 9-17 years of age can sign up for one or more sessions.
“With my job at PDS, it was always about strengthening the athletes,” Young said. “A couple years into my tenure, I wanted to stretch it out and bring the speed and agility aspect into it. So I started to get certifications in that aspect of strength and conditioning. The natural thing was to bring it to the kids. I started with the middle school and high school there at PDS and now the natural thing is to bring it to the community, which we are doing this year.”
With so many athletes specializing in just one sport, Young realizes the value of training that incorporates the use of different muscles. He’ll use these sessions to focus on speed and agility, as opposed to strength training.
“What I have learned is that speed is a skill,” Young said. “Some people are not born with that natural ability. But if you work on the techniques and put the work in, when it comes to coordinating the body with the arms and legs, it happens over time. What I will bring is to have those techniques available. This type of training is for elite athletes who wants to get better or newer athletes looking to learn the skills to take them to the next level.”
The sessions, which got underway on Thursday, run from 6-7 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, as well as 10-11 a.m. on Saturdays.
“It is right there at Grover Park, which is an easy and convenient location,” Young said of the park, which is located behind the Princeton Shopping Center. “We will put a couple of rain dates in at the back end of the sessions in case it rains. We did two free sessions to see if anyone wanted to come out and see what it was about. We had eight kids come to that and we have more signed up for this week.
“I think it will catch on. It is the kind of thing you can’t get anywhere else. It is a rare chance to get pro coaching at a low a price. With the way sports are going, kids are starting to specialize in different sports, Even with the kids doing a specific sport, this will help an athlete develop other aspects of his or her body, which will help that sport.”
Young’s overall objective is to make each participant a better athlete, which in turn should help them become better at whatever sport they happen to play.
“What I have seen in the past is a kid will start to specialize in a sport and they just work the muscles that are part of that sport,” he said. “Their bodies actually burn out in that sport and they start to get injured. My main goal is to keep kids injury free and on the field or court as long as possible without any problems. We will do flexibility, core strength and obviously speed and agility.
“What I say to all coaches who I work with is, I will make your athlete a better athlete. I am not going to tell them how to hit a ball. You give me an athlete and I will make them a better athlete, which makes them a better athlete for that sport.”
Young has been at PDS for the last 10 years. He started doing personal training in 2001 and has continued to evolve as a trainer, especially when it comes to getting younger athletes ready to play.
“I was coaching basketball at Princeton High,” Young recalled. “I wanted to strengthen my players and make sure they were ready to play all the time. So the natural thing to do was train them and try to make them better. When the performance training center at Gold’s Gym (which was located in Lawrence) opened up, that gave me an opportunity to start to train younger athletes, which I loved.
“I was the Director of the Performance Training Center at Gold’s from 2005-2007, and then I left to go to PDS.”
Now, Young is looking to offer his expertise beyond just the athletes at PDS.
“Anyone who wants to come in can come in,” Young said. “We also do groups, so if someone wanted to bring a whole team they could. If you are a program like a Little League program and want to bring the whole team, there are discounts for that.”
For more information on the Speed and Agility program offered by Young, contact Victory Sports at [email protected].
