Sports teams that achieve success usually do so for several reasons. Baseball teams win on a consistent basis because of a combination of hitting, pitching and defense. In football, it's offense, defense and special teams. At Mineola High School, it just may be a team of experts in fitness and nutrition that gives the Mustangs a winning edge.

As far as Athletic Director Tony Gulli knows, Mineola is the first and only high school on Long Island to utilize the expertise of Sports and Exercise Systems (SES), a program used by major college Division I and professional athletes, introduced to Mineola last month by Hofstra University Strength and Conditioning Coach Herve Damas and his staff in an orientation for 9th, 10th, and 11th grade athletes as well as their coaches.

The concept behind the program is for experts in different fields of fitness such as strength and conditioning, flexibility, nutrition and injury prevention to pass on their knowledge to Mineola's coaches and student-athletes. The program, Gulli hopes, will give Mineola's athletes a competitive edge through strength and conditioning while, more importantly, preventing injuries.

"We want kids to play highly competitively. We want kids to do a lot of things but we also try to [keep them healthy] as much as possible," said Gulli.

For coaches, Gulli says SES's program will give them a new outlook as far as conditioning, preseason conditioning and different deficiencies to look for in kids.

The SES team includes Damas, who is the coordinator of strength and conditioning, Melissa Aymar, coordinator of nutrition services, Peter Schultz, coordinator of injury prevention and rehabilitation services, and Dr. Henry Tu, coordinator of flexibility and injury treatment.

Each has an area of specialization and together, they are confident they can advise students and coaches correctly and safely. "What we did was combine the best elements of each individual discipline and put together a program that is specifically tailored toward the needs and demands of individual sports, broken down into positions, gender, athletic ability and age being that we're dealing with adolescents," said Damas.

Although the program started in March, it began to make its way to Mineola High School two years ago. That's when Damas was taking a graduate class at Hofstra, where Gulli teaches as an adjunct professor.

Damas did a presentation on flexibility that impressed Gulli so much, the two began talking about the possibilities of presenting strength and conditioning seminars to coaches.

"I think it's something that's good for kids and that's what I'm all about," said Gulli. "I think it's something that is lifelong and can be taken with them when they graduate, whether it be to the next level in college or whether it be personally. There's nothing but positives in it for them."

Damas, a Hofstra graduate who played football briefly for the Buffalo Bills, and his staff began giving seminars to Mineola's fall sport athletes and coaches in preparation for next season. He said student-athletes, through the program, will have the opportunity to learn about their bodies and proper fitness and nutrition in preparation for competition. However, Damas said the SES team has spent more time with the coaches. "We're actually providing the coaches with the tools to implement and make this happen. We're giving them all of our information," he said. "It was important to us that we don't undermind the coaches."

At one seminar held on a Saturday afternoon last month, Damas showed coaches a "high pull" and a "high clean" exersise which helps strengthen hips.

Also last month, Damas and his staff met with coaches and athletes for an orientation and assessments. Pre-testing was done on March 18 on three quarters of the 9th, 10th and 11th grade fall sport student-athletes, according to Gulli. The SES staff also began a series of training programs with Mineola's fall sport coaches, teaching the coaches about certain exercises and nutrition for the purpose of getting their players to eat better and exercise correctly, which may prevent future injuries.

Damas said SES encourages student-athletes to do a lot of exercises that will help prevent injuries and those exercises are tailored to individual sports and positions within those sports. For example, pitchers in baseball are susceptable to rotator cuff injuries. SES would encourage proper warm up and rest periods, functional strengthening of the rotator cuff muscles and proper stretching of the anterior shoulder musculature.

The SES staff will return to Mineola High School on May 13 to give athletes an evaluation of their pre-tests and give suggestions for a conditioning and nutritional program to get the athletes ready for the fall season, Gulli said. The SES staff will redo the program, beginning in September for the spring and winter sport coaches and athletes.

"Kids were real enthusiastic. That was proved to me on March 18. We had close to 200 kids show up," Gulli said.

Although weight training may be thought of by athletes as the way to improve performance, a major aspect of the program is nutrition, a subject, Gulli says, that may not be completely understood by kids. Although the subject of nutrition is addressed during the personal fitness program given to all ninth grade students as part of the Mineola's physical education curriculum, the SES program gives student-athletes an opportunity to apply the lessons, Gulli said. "In a society where anorexia and bulemia are out there, not only for females but for males, it's important for these kids to know the right way to do things."

At a Saturday morning seminar, Aymar discussed with coaches that the type of activity someone is doing, the duration and intensity in which it is being done, body type and functional mass as well as an athlete's gender and age help to determine recommendations on specific food choices. She taught coaches how to figure out the energy expended to metabolize and absorb food as well as how to calculate percentages of carbohydrates, proteins and fats in a given diet. Athletes could then make modifications based on the calculations.

Aymar said that student-athletes are still growing so their calories should not be restricted. She said the purpose of the nutritional aspect of the program is to help student-athletes make better food choices. Eating better, she said, will give athletes more energy, the body will function better and lean body mass will increase.

By eating correctly, kids will be able to discover a safe way to possibly enhance their performances as opposed to taking controversial supplements such as creatine or androstinedione.

"There are so many supplements out there that kids can buy over the counter and they're quick fixes. The thing is, with a lot of those supplements, they are not FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approved and there's a lot of research that hasn't been done on that stuff," said Gulli. "There are a lot of things that kids are taking that are not real beneficial."

According to a spokesperson for the Food and Drug Administration, no dietary supplemant, including creatine and androstinedione, has been approved by the FDA.

Aymar says if students eat correctly, everything they need to live a healthy life and perform athletically should be in their diet. "The food that they eat provides them with everything they need to achieve their goals," Aymar said, adding that nutrition provides the basis for everything students do, whether it's out on the field or in the classroom.

It is obvious the population as a whole has begun to understand the importance of fitness. Now, Damas and his staff have made it their goal to make student-athletes understand that the way to ensure health and longevity is to strengthen their body. "You can't wait until you become ill or you compromise your physical structure to take steps to handle that so a lot of what's going on is preventative," he said.