“Many coaches told me that playing different sports would get me worn out,” Rylee Sager said.
The Lompoc High School senior disagrees. She ran cross country for two years before taking up golf for the next two. During the winter, she “plays everywhere” for the Lompoc basketball team—on varsity from her freshman year onward. And in the spring, she’s a shortstop for Lompoc’s softball team—again, varsity from her freshman year.
“I don’t get burned out,” Sager said. “That’s not me.”
She took up golf because she was bored with cross country. “I wanted to do something different,” she told the Sun, “to try other sports.” Her first year playing, she stroked her way into the top 13.
“It was a pretty good outcome,” she said. “For now.”
And so, for now, she’ll stay out on the green and continue to try and get better. Sager said she likes golf because it moves slower than the other sports that she plays.
“It’s more laid back, and there’s not a lot of fast movement,” she said. “It’s just a sport to enjoy instead of always trying to compete.”
She likes golf because it’s slow-paced, but she loves basketball because it moves quickly.
“It’s a fast-moving sport,” she said. “You always have to be on your toes. It’s very competitive, which I love.”
Staying on her toes in basketball, Sager explained, is different than the precise forms that she needs to learn for the other sports she plays—the motions of batting in softball, the form of running in cross country, or the careful swings of golf.
“There’s no set standards in basketball,” she said. “You get to do your own skills and movements, which is fun to do.”
Softball, however, is her absolute favorite. She wants a scholarship to play—a scholarship for anywhere, basically. “So I can go to the next level.” Her hope is that anywhere will be Cal State Fullerton, where she is thinking about studying kinesiology.
She’s good at softball, too—“all my years I’ve been first team, all league,” she said.
Does playing different sports give Sager a kind of cross-training? Sure, she said. “It give me skills, motivation,” she said.
Moreover, she said, cross-training as an athlete helps to cross-train her as a person.
“It just helps to develop a good mindset of what a person has to go through,” she ruminated, “challenges and how to get through them.”
This article appears in Sep 10-17, 2015.
