DR. WALLACE: I'm a good athlete at my high school and I'm wrapping up my junior year. One of my coaches told me that over this upcoming summer, he wants me to work on my agility. I'm already pretty successful and I know that you were a former coach, so do you buy into adding additional agility for an athlete, one who's already highly successful the way he is? — My Performance is Already Excellent, via email

MY PERFORMANCE IS ALREADY EXCELLENT: Well, I'm glad that you have succeeded well in your athletic endeavors thus far. But as a former coach, I agree that adding agility to any athlete's repertoire, male or female, is a good thing, no matter what level they're performing at already.

The word agility in athletics is a quick way of referring to neuromuscular coordination and speed. Agility also encompasses an athlete being able to make explosive moves to quickly change direction as needed in competition, while maintaining balance and speed, within the limitations of any particular body type.

Weight training is a good baseline to build agility upon and jumping rope and doing lateral shuffles also help develop agility. You may have also seen old film clips of NFL players running through a long line of rope cordoned off into squares as they are to place their feet into the squares while running and then lift them out without tripping on the ropes. This drill is all about agility, even though most NFL players are already extremely athletic. The same holds for all major sports.

In my opinion, your coach's suggestion will likely increase your level of success and coordination. If you have hopes of playing one or more of your sports at the collegiate level, I would absolutely use this upcoming summer to focus hard on improving your agility.

I LOVE TO BE THE 'BROADCASTER' OF LOCAL NEWS AND GOSSIP

DR. WALLACE: I'm a guy who likes to talk a lot and as a junior in high school, I'm pretty confident and outgoing. I also have a knack for picking up tidbits of information or news that other people haven't heard yet or found out about. My nickname at school is "broadcast" as in broadcast news.

Some of my friends, upon seeing me on a Monday at school, will ask me, "What's leading today's broadcast?" Well, this past Monday, I happened to have some new information. I played in a pickup basketball game over the weekend and one of the star athletes at our school rolled his ankle, but fortunately, it was only a slight roll, not a devastating one. He limped to the sidelines, took off his shoes and socks and his ankle indeed started swelling up. We got him ice and after 15 minutes, it went down quite a bit.

While this was going on, I noticed that on that particular foot, he had this protuberance coming out of the side of his big toe; it looked like some sort of weird growth or something about the size of a small marble. I mentioned this to some friends as the tidbit of news that I gave them on a Monday morning. But eventually, the word got back to this guy and he came up to me at school in a very heated way and he was really ticked off at me for talking about "the biology of his feet!"

Was I wrong or out of place for mentioning this, even though it's 100% true! I did not make this up at all, as I saw it with my own eyes! Therefore, I feel I'm within my rights to mention it as it's really no big deal because he's still a great athlete and has performed well for years at our school. What's your opinion on this? — I Say He Overreacted, via email

I SAY HE OVERREACTED: Talking about anyone's biology at any time is a very delicate subject. In the future, I'd advise you not to speak about other people's bodies at all.

If you wish to persist with your "broadcast" personality, try to address less controversial topics and be more informative in general about things going on in your community, school or positive things that individuals are doing that would have no problem being disseminated to a wider audience.

We do live at times in a shock culture and a culture seemingly driven to expose every tidbit available about every single person, organization, or group. But I still feel you would do well to pare your list of topics down to the ones I suggested and definitely leave any body flaws or body shaping issues out of your future "broadcasts."

Dr. Robert Wallace welcomes questions from readers. Although he is unable to reply to all of them individually, he will answer as many as possible in this column. Email him at [email protected]. To find out more about Dr. Robert Wallace and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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