Status as 'walk-on recruit' lights fire under soccer star

The package from the Georgetown University men's soccer team arrived at Ben Slingerland's home in Beverly about six days before his graduation this spring from St. John's Prep.

Inside was one thick packet, some 20-plus pages, and a yellow laminated card outlining the program's summer fitness plan for its freshman recruits. For the next 12 weeks, Slingerland would be a prisoner to that workout regimen, and he considers it the best ball and chain he's ever received.

He took the package, jetted to his room, and hopped onto the Internet, just to look again at Georgetown's roster for the fall season.

While he was online, he looked down the list of the school's top recruits, seeing all the big names, seeing some names he didn't recognize, and finally seeing that his name was nowhere on the list. It was his team, and it didn't even mention him. So he decided to take that packet of workouts to heart, and he'd make them notice.

"The way I look at it," he said, "I'm essentially a recruited walk-on. I'm not playing on scholarship. I need every day for me to get that much better. And if I'm not getting better this day, then I'm taking a step backward."

The seniors at the Catholic school in Danvers graduated May 20. Slingerland went to the track at Gordon College in Wenham on May 21.

Georgetown soccer coach Brian Wiese would be impressed.

"If you're not committed to do the work in the summer," Wiese said, "you're not going to last in Division 1 athletics."

Those packets are what turn summer vacation into an extended fall sports season, and, nowadays, almost any athlete prepping for the next level can expect to receive one.

Slingerland could have gone to a Division 3 school and become a star. He was Williams College's top recruit. But he wanted to go to Georgetown.

"The Division 1 program appealed to me more because I felt if I had gone to Williams, I probably would been coming in here," he said, holding his right hand high above his left to show the difference in talent level. "Going to Georgetown, I'd have to work my way up. I'm one of the most competitive people out there. So I love just having to work for everything and just having a challenge."

The summer program was the first task.

The day the workout instructions arrived, Slingerland printed out Georgetown's list of recruits and put it on his door. Every time he walked out the door, he saw the team he was working to make. He wants to make sure that when he gets to the Washington, D.C., school, people know his name.

"That's what I'm thinking about when I'm doing my last 'suicide,' " he said, describing one of his grueling workout routines. "In my head, I have to get faster. I have to do this. I have to do that much more to be better than the next guy who's trying to get on the field."

When his friends went to the beach, Slingerland went to Gordon College with five baseballs and his cleats. He set the baseballs 5 yards apart, with the last one 25 yards away. Then, he sprinted to the first one and back to the start, then to the next and back, and the next and the next until he cleared them all.

He had to do it in less than 35 seconds.

He got a 90-second rest. Then he had to do it again -- five more times.

"After my sixth one, I thought I was going to die," he said.

Ten weeks later, he's doing 10 of those.

"I can't say I'm doing it really easily," he said. "I'm still sweating, still about to die when I'm done, but they have gotten a little easier."

The idea, Wiese said, is to get Slingerland and the rest of the incoming class prepared to play at a level unlike anything they've seen before.

"It is a big jump," Wiese said. "If you're a high school senior, you're the big tuna, you're the big fish in the sea there. And just nine months later, you're stepping onto a field with men. You're a 17-, 18-year-old kid mentally and physically, and you're stepping on the field with 21-, 22-, and 23-year-old men sometimes. So it does help bridge that gap."

Wiese, in his second season at Georgetown, has coached at Stanford and Notre Dame, taking this summer program with him to each stop. He's seen it help incoming freshmen physically with stamina, but also mentally with their confidence. "When players come into college, there's a culture shock," he said.

"It's a new game, there's a new coach, it's new teammates. There's a lot going on. The more fit they are, the more comfortable they'll be in that regard. It's just one less area for them to be insecure about when they're coming in."

But the commitment during the summer is only the start.

"What I found," Wiese said, "is that they don't quite understand what it takes until you're here."

For many athletes, this is a four-year marriage -- to the team, the practice, the training, and the games -- and a divorce from many of the other things that make college what it is.

"They've got to make sacrifices as athletes at a place like Georgetown," Wiese said. "They've got to put more of their social life on the back burner than a lot of their classmates coming in. They have to maintain fitness, they have to train, they have to do video, they have strength and conditioning. They have classes."

They also have lives, which are equally as important, according to sports psychologist Grayson Kimball. He understands a single-minded focus, a goal-oriented nature and a desire to win, but not completely at the expense of a young person's identity outside of athletics.

He is a consultant for the New England Academy of Tennis in Natick, and education director at GetPsychedSports.org, a nonprofit entity that teams with the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association to enhance the high school experience for young athletes.

"Obviously, the demands on college athletes, especially the senior in high school going into his or her freshman year -- they're going to want to do everything to impress the coaches," Kimball said. "Some kids tend to feel better about themselves if they know they're putting in all this time. However, if you do put in all this time and he doesn't get the scholarship, he may feel like a failure."

Like it or not, a college coach's career depends on wins and losses, Kimball said.

"So, if he brings in a bunch of athletes who aren't prepared, aren't ready, aren't talented enough," Kimball said, "over the course of two or three years, he's most likely going to be looking for another job."

The result is "a sort of professionalization of the high school and the college athlete."

Kimball acknowledged that of all the things floating through a player's head, success and failure among them, the training is the one thing an athlete can control.

Slingerland has modest expectations, even with all the work he's put in during the summer. The plan this season is for Georgetown to be an up-tempo team that's always running and always pressuring opponents. He isn't anticipating much in the way of playing time but, should the time come, he's prepared.

"I'm going in with the mentality that I have to earn everything I get," he said. "I'm not going to get too discouraged if I don't get on the field right away my freshman year. My goal would be to not stop working hard. I don't look at this season as a failure if I don't step on the field. It would give me that much more desire to work harder next off-season and keep on working."

Georgetown began practice last Sunday, and Wiese was ready with a test that allows him -- in just 12 minutes -- to determine how hard his incoming players have trained.

It's called the Cooper Run, and it's never failed him. (The test was designed by Kenneth H. Cooper in 1968 for US military use.)

"Like everything in life," he said, "there's first impressions, and that's one of the first ones you'll be given."

It's nothing fancy -- just a 2-mile run, with 12 minutes to get it done.

"If one of our freshman comes in and isn't able to do that, you start wondering if they've done their work over the summer," Wiese said. "If somebody comes in and does it in 11:55 or 11:50, you say that's good, he's in decent shape.

"But if somebody comes in and runs it in 11 minutes or 10 1/2 minutes, then you're going to say, 'Boy, that guy can go!' And that's certainly not going to hurt his case for getting on the field."

Julian Benbow can be reached at jbenbow@globe.com.

Ben Slingerland

High school: St. John’s Prep, Danvers

Highlights: The Globe’s 2006 Player of the Year, the senior midfielder earned Catholic Conference MVP and All-America honors after leading the Prep to the Division 1 state title last fall.

The future: Will play soccer at Georgetown as a ‘‘recruited walk-on.’’

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