Samson\'s College and High School Strength and Conditioning Coaches of the Year

by: Curt Block
by: Steve Srinivasan
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Division I-AA: Russell Patterson-Appalachian State

The pace of an Appalachian State football game is dictated by their no-huddle offense.The breakneck scheme results in a high number of plays and keeps both sides of the ball in constant readiness.

Having them prepared for the full 60 is the job of strength and conditioning coach Russell Patterson. It must be working. The Boone, NC Mountaineers captured the Southern Conference title with a 6-1 mark, were 12-3 overall, and captured the ultimate prize: the National Division I-AA crown.

Patterson, who came to ASU in the summer of 2004 after six years at Clemson, believes the number one ingredient in developing a young player is speed. “There’s no substitute for it,” he says. But, of course, there’s more.

“My overall philosophy is that it’s important for the kids to be as strong as they possibly can be but I don’t ever want to sacrifice speed or being in shape or having great stamina. We work hard to get strong and powerful but our bread and butter is the running we do during the summer and in camp. The kids see the benefits of hard work and what they can accomplish with it.”

All the time and effort requires a 12-month commitment from every player. But as in any large group of young men some will work harder than others. Patterson has a few methods of trying to reach those players who are habitually late for workouts or are offering less than 100 per cent.

“First is a face to face sitdown conversation. If that fails, everyone faces extended workout time in the gym.” If the slacker problem persists Patterson has something else up his sleeve. He “punishes” only the players who have been doing everything exactly right while the offending individual stands in from of the group as a symbolic Scarlett Letter and just watches.

That’s peer pressure.

Division II: Rob Mikulski-East Stroudsburg University

East Stroudsburg University reached the NCAA Division II semi-finals this season after winning the Northeast Regional Championships with a 12-3 record. Rob Mikulski, who played on the 1986 Penn State National Champions, is in his 19th season at ESU.

The strength and conditioning coordinator tells the Warriors that improving their strength is just one element of his program. “We show them that the year round program also includes speed and plyometrics. We give them a week or two off after the season to heal up and then we start with the power phase of our workouts. At this time of year we let them do a lot of aerobics, distance running or playing basketball on their own and then we get back to lifting. The lifting program is designed to build up their strength but the most effective way to achieve their goals sometimes requires a little extra help.

“Our players are always lifting with a partner. We find it gives them some additional motivation. That way they’re likely to stay in the weight room longer. However, we’ve learned that matching players with their close friends isn’t always the best idea because they don’t always push each other hard enough.

“We’ve gotten better results by switching them around and partnering a freshman with an upper classman who’s accustomed to working a little harder and we know is a leader. The older guys know what they need to do in order to be successful and get to the next level. The younger players learn that most of the guys who excel and get the accolades are the ones who rarely missed a workout when they were freshmen.”

It’s a situation akin to what parents regard as a sibling rivalry.

Division III: Jay Locey (Linfield College)

Question: Has any college football team ever compiled 50 consecutive winning seasons? Answer: Yes, One. Division III, Linfield College.

Most recently the McMinnville, OR Wildcats have dominated the Northwest Conference finishing on top in five of the last six seasons, including a national division title in 2004 and a 60-6 record since 2000. One of the reasons for the incredible success is continuity. Over that lengthy span Linfield has had only four different head coaches since 1956. Jay Locey occupies that position now and has for the last 10 seasons. In addition to the head coach responsibilities, Locey doubles up as strength and conditioning coach. As such he is quick to point out that Division III schools cannot mandate S&C drills to their non scholarship players.

“Our boys must have intrinsic motivation,” the coach explains. “The guys need their own vision and blueprint of what is involved to be good and achieve their best. They know that improvement in power, speed, strength, quickness and agility is going to make them better. Because of that intrinsic motivation the majority jump at our structured program which is based on Olympic lifting and includes power clean, power snatch, push presses, push jerks, squat and bench, flat bench and dumbbells.”

Locey also encourages his players to spend time away from the football drills with their teammates. “I think good team concepts and chemistry can come from players who hang out with each other and participate in other games whether it’s pickup basketball or Nintendo.”

Winning can become infectious in any competition.

NAIA: Mike Hogan (Carroll College, MT)

Carroll College in Helena, MT is the first NAIA school ever to win four consecutive titles and only the second college at any level to achieve such dominance. (The other was Division III Augustana, IL, 1983-86). The Fighting Saints also own the nation’s current longest winning streak at 21.

Success has many fathers but among them at Carroll are head coach Mike Van Diest, the reigning NAIA Coach of the Year, and Jim Hogan, who serves in the dual role of offensive line coach and strength and conditioning mentor.

Hogan, who played outside linebacker at the University of Montana, developed his own strength and conditioning concepts early on. Both as a player and young coach he based his overall (lifting) philosophy on a one repetition max approach in bench, squat and power cleans. One repetition max means loading up the bar to a maximum weight where a player thinks he can achieve one rep. In succeeding years Hogan has modified his plan.

“I began to notice that when players go for the one repetition max it sometimes resulted in them going far beyond their capability and occasionally caused some small tears in the shoulder girdle or knees. I then moved to a three rep max format which made the players more aware of their own personal strength levels and bodies in projecting what their max should be.”

In addition to the winning records Hogan has found another major benefit that doesn’t appear in the game stats. “We haven’t had any major injuries to our players. How much of that is due to our strength and conditioning is hard to measure. Whether it’s because of our three rep procedure I can’t be sure but we haven’t had any big knee injuries, shoulder problems or neck injuries that many school’s experience.”

Junior College: Mickey Bell (Glendale Community College)

Glendale (Ariz.) Community College’s Mickey Bell of was a receiver at Utah State. He signed with the Denver Broncos as a nondrafted free agent. He didn’t make the team, but he later played professionally in Italy, learning training techniques from his two pro opportunities. He continued learning technique as a defensive coordinator and strength and conditioning coach in Arizona.

Says Bell: “Powerlifting was a big part of things back when I played. Today, we have eliminated the support systems of belts, knee wraps and straps. It was hard to grow up with one method of thinking, and then have to change. But it makes sense: you don’t go out on the field with those support systems, you have the ground, and you have your joints and the fibers around those joints. On the field, athletes are in such unstable conditions, jumping, falling, crouching. If you don’t train in those conditions, you aren’t preparing and protecting yourself properly.

“Junior college is different than high school or four-year colleges,” Bell says. “We only have these guys for one or two years. We don’t have on-campus housing or scholarships, so we recruit locally and we’ve got to get incoming freshmen ready to play right now to help us compete.”

Bell attributes a lot of his team’s success to techniques devised by Arizona State’s Joe Kenn. “Joe is one of the top guys in the country, and they’ve been very helpful,” Bell says. “Three years ago, I sat down with Joe and went over their program and concepts and developed methods that we can realistically do using the same basic concepts as ASU.” We train the way we play. A lot of it is psychological and mental. It’s intense, we train Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the offseason. We train in the afternoons. A lot of our kids support themselves or their families. They head off to work after practice, so you can’t ask 4-5 days of training from these kids. We have less time and more obstacles.

“Everything we do is high-tempo. In football you have to train for speed, strength and explosion, but you have to train the players to explode for 4-6 seconds and then rest for 25-35 seconds, and do it again. You have to keep it as realistic as possible.”

High School: Larry Kellom (Clovis HS, Clovis, CA)

“We do a real good job of sharing our top athletes with other sports, so a unified (strength and conditioning) program throughout our athletic program is essential,” says Larry Kellom, the head football coach and strength and conditioning coach at Clovis High School (CA). “We want everybody using the same program and using the same terminology. We believe that strength training is a race against time. We get about 8 months to get our athletes into the best possible shape , and about 4 months to keep them that way . Because of injury risk, we are very careful about what we have athletes do.”

Kellom’s major points about his program:
• “We start by pretesting our players in bench, parallel squats and hang cleans. We do not max them out, but try to find out what they can do for 3-5 reps (making sure they do everything properly).

• We then make individualized work-out prescriptions for each athlete.

• It is essential to include one explosive movement in each workout to develop quick-twitch muscles.”

Says Kellom: “These lifts are the basis of our program. Each day, the athlete attempts his prescription in one or two of those lifts along with some corresponding exercises. We mix things up for variety, and we make sure our athletes have a goal in each work-out (a failure set). The weights are examples. You must find out what each one of your guys can do with pretesting before you give them assignments. We really like the ‘failure’ concept because it gives each athlete a goal to reach every time they enter the weight room, and it lets them see their strength improve as they put more effort into working out. We believe there are a lot of ways to develop your athletes in the off-season. For a strength program to be successful, we believe it has to be organized by day, week, month, and the year. We believe that athletes must understand what they are trying to accomplish and how it will help them become a better athlete. We believe there should be some way for the athlete to see improvement. If your program includes these strength-training aspects, it will be successful.”

High School: Mike Durand
(Harvard-Westlake High School, North Hollywood, CA)

Mike Durand is the director of strength and conditioning for Harvard-Westlake (Calif.) School. Durand has coached at the college and NFL levels, and has been working with prep players for the last two years. “With high school athletes, our goal is to become great at the fundamentals of strength training and speed development,” says Durand. “We do a few basic things, and we do them very well.”

Durand’s philosophy involves:
• Free weights
• Explosive training (low to high intensity depending on the athlete)
• Ground-based Olympic and strength movements
• Multiple-joint movements
• Flexibility
• Injury prevention/prehabilitation
• Torso training
• Running mechanics
• Linear speed development
• Lateral speed and agility
• Energy-system development


The off-season: “Our training consists of four training days in the weight room. At the beginning, we focus on three linear-speed days per week for the first 6-8 weeks. We then incorporate lateral speed and agility training in late February or early March. Football players spend 9-10 months of the year doing change-of-direction work in practice, games and training. We like to give them a break from that for the first couple of months during the off-season. We are fortunate and have a long off-season that lets us accomplish more things in training. We have 16 weeks of off-season training without interruptions such as spring ball, OTAs and mini camps.”

In-season: “The training is three days per week. Our first training day is Saturday, the day after the game. We lift, (our heaviest strength movement is on this day) do a squatting movement along with pulling and rowing movements, and perform a low-intensity team run to flush post-game stiffness and soreness. Our second day is on Monday with our heaviest Olympic movement occurring on this day along with pressing movements and posterior chain movements. On Wednesday we do our lightest and fastest Olympic movement along with a light single-leg movement, pelvic stabilization and upper back work. Torso training is done on every training day.

“With high school athletes, stick to the basics, the things that will give you the most return on your investment. Time constraints are always an issue no matter what level you coach at. Fill your weight room with equipment that helps you to train a group of athletes effectively and efficiently.”

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GLENDALES BELL: CONCEPTS TO REMEMBER

• Develop a team concept. “Everybody training together with all coaches involved, there’s a lot of competition in the weight room and on the field, and it helps with all the position coaches there watching.”

• Train speed, strength and explosion. “We’re doing stability lifts and explosive lifts, and we keep a high-tempo. We pair a lot of our lifts, so athletes aren’t sitting and waiting for their turn. We work in groups of four. Two lifts are paired. There’s a lot of medicine ball work, lateral and reverse lunges, split squats, lateral step ups, all joint-stability related. They need to understand our tempo. We keep those workouts under 65 minutes, that’s something I got from Joe Kenn. If it’s longer than that they’re screwing around.

“Offenses and defense train and run separately. One group is in the weight room and the other is running. It isn’t perfect, but then again, we don’t keep lists (of personal and team bests) on the wall. That’s not important. Our 600-pound squatter might not be able to play a lick. We want everyone to get better. If we win a national championship trophy, it’s not for best squat.

• The other prime thing is to train to reduce the chance of injury. “The best way to become a better football player is to be out on the field practicing and playing. We back off a little with tempo, intensity and technique during the season, but that’s what we’re always talking about in the weight room and on the field. I’d rather see a guy squat with good technique at 200 pounds than 350 pounds and poor technique. It’s going to help you become a better football player. I’d rather they don’t put weight on the bar and do it right. Technique is critical in all the lifts and things we do. We do things properly and to reduce the chance of injury."

For Bell, Monday is the power clean or hang clean day. A total body lift. Wednesday is squat day, and Friday is their bench work day.

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