Strength in Numbers

Tommy Knotts
Quarterbacks Coach, Duke
Former Head Coach, Independence High School
Charlotte, N.C.
2003 football team: Class 4A State Champions

Whether it be a rigorous strength and conditioning program or an abundance of talented players such as Florida quarterback Chris Leak – most likely the two feed off each other – Tommy Knotts has mastered high school football in Charlotte, N.C.

Independence High School has won 62 games in a row, the second-longest streak in America, behind Concord De La Salle. In four years, Independence won four Class 4A state championships, becoming the first North Carolina school to win four state titles in a row since it established divisions in 1959. In those four years, Independence finished in the top four nationally, according to USA Today.

While Independence will have a chance to try for their fifth-straight title this year, Knotts will not. After 21 years as a head coach at three North Carolina high schools - where he compiled a record of 228-55 – Knotts was hired as the quarterback coach at Duke University.

He will leave behind a legacy – and a coaching staff, now headed by longtime assistant Bill Geiler – that is firmly entrenched in strength and conditioning.

“It’s the No. 1 thing we do that has helped us to be successful,” Geiler said.

Independence has one rule when it comes to weights.

“If they don’t lift they can’t play,” Geiler said. “Everyone’s in weight training whether they like it or not. They either play our way or not at all. We don’t really distinguish between in-season and out of season. We lift on game days. If we were 0-and-whatever, it’d be a lot harder to sell what we’re doing. When we win, it’s easier.”

The team focuses on squats and bench presses on Mondays and Tuesdays, and incline lifts and power cleans on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

“ I think it’s prevented a whole lot of injuries, also,” Geiler said.

One notable person saved from serious harm was Knotts himself. Two years ago, Knotts came down with what he thought was viral meningitis. After not missing a practice his entire career, Knotts missed two weeks of practice and one game.

“It turns out it was West Nile Virus,” Geiler said. “If he wasn’t in such great shape, he could’ve died.”

Patrick McHenry, MA, CSCS-D
Strength and Conditioning Coach
Ponderosa High School
Parker, Colo.
2003 football team: 5A State Champs

Patrick McHenry didn’t write the book on high school strength training. He did, however, contribute three-and-a-half chapters of text and appear on the cover with his students, who are in pictures throughout the book.

In the National Strength and Conditioning Association High School Coaches Manual, McHenry explains the tools and techniques he has learned since being brought into the profession in part because of the organization in 1989. McHenry was an elementary school teacher and wanted to be a principal. After getting involved with the NSCA, his career plans changed.

“It’s all because of the NSCA that I am where I am now,” McHenry said.

In part because of McHenry’s rigorous weightlifting and speed-agility drills, Ponderosa High School in Parker, Colo., won the state’s Class 5A title this year.

“When we won state, everyone said the other team was supposed to be bigger and stronger,” McHenry said. “Well, after the game, the other team’s offensive line coach said we were stronger and quicker off the ball. I take pride in that.”

McHenry teaches 14 weightlifting sections to athletes from all sports at Ponderosa. He opens the weight room at 6 a.m. and usually closes it around dusk. He makes sure that football players not only lift weights and work on speed and agility, but helps to stretch players before games and the morning after, while the coaches are watching game film. During the summer, McHenry puts players through hour-long speed and agility drills from 6 a.m. to noon.

“It’s my job to show our kids what colleges are going to do if they make it to the next level,” he said. “I want to prepare them for that. I take a lot of pride when someone comes in a freshman and can barely walk and chew gum, and then leaves as a Division I athlete.”

And if his athletes ever forget what to do, they can always go find McHenry’s book. Make that two. 101 Strength and Conditioning Drills, which he co-authored, is due out in April

Mike Nitka, MS, CSCS USAW
Strength and Conditioning Coach
Muskego (Wis.) High School
Chairman, NSCA High School Coaches SIG
2003 football team: 1-8

Sometimes Mike Nitka found it hard to just be another parent in the crowd at his kids’ little league and soccer games. Often, he’d climb into the far corner of the bleachers and watch the game with the trained eye of an expert in the actions of adolescent athletes.

“People always used to ask me what I thought about a specific play,” he said, “but I wasn’t watching the play. I was watching the movement. After a while, when parents found out what it was I did, they’d ask me what they thought of their kids bio-mechanically.

“I don’t think many of them had ever met a guy who looks at sports like I do. I look at movement. That’s what’s important.”

Nitka is a believer in plyometrics, a style of training that focuses on muscles being stretched and then contracted. That style has helped him not only train high school athletes, but ones much younger. Teaming with the Muskego Parks and Recreation Department, Nitka helps to train athletes as young as sixth-graders every summer.

Stressing speed, agility and quickness, Nitka helps children prepare themselves for organized athletics.

“People think that training always needs to be done with an apparatus, and that’s not correct,” he said. “When we take kids and have them run and jump, they don’t call that training. They call it fun. It’s productive, but it’s fun. And that’s important.”

The kids are in good hands. Motivated by the willingness of other coaches to help him when he started out, Nitka has remained active in the NSCA. Nitka was named Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year by NSCA in 1994 and has been nominated two other times. He also served as the NSCA Vice President for Youth and Adolescent Activities, and writes a column in the NSCA Journal.

Training kids at an early age – Nitka said it’s best to start six months before they start playing super-competitive sports – has made it easier for the director of human performance at Muskego High School to develop prep athletes.

“Once they get to high school, we just polish them up,” he said.

Jerry Wheeler
Asst. Football Coach/Strength and Conditioning Coach
Mountain View High School
Mesa, Ariz.
2003 football team: lost in Class 5A semifinals

Jerry Wheeler isn’t your typical computer geek. He doesn’t look the part. Most strength and conditioning coaches don’t.

But armed with the computerized strength program from Dr. Chuck Stiggins at Brigham Young University, Wheeler has been able to produce even greater results from an already prominent high school football program at Mountain View High School in Mesa, Ariz.

Upon meeting in 1994, Stiggins showed Wheeler a new way to monitor repetitions and sets for the 22 sports at the high school. Wheeler implemented the computer program the next year. Since then, the football team has gone from winning 86 percent of its games to a whopping 93 percent.

It’s not all keystrokes and mouse-clicks at Mountain View – it’s hard work. During the summer, Wheeler helps train more than 500 kids four days a week, 11 hours a day.

The computer program helps to design specific training programs for each individual sport, of which there are more than 30 to choose from. For football, Wheeler likes to focus on explosive drills that mimic a player’s stance – the clean and jerk, back squat and front squat, to name a few.

“Everything you do is sports-specific,” he said, “but you’ve got to train explosively to play explosively. And I haven’t seen a sport yet that doesn’t rely on explosiveness.”

Wheeler, who has been at Mountain View since 1991 and has more than 20 years of experience of strength coaching, has mentored countless future Division I athletes at the football powerhouse. Baltimore Ravens tight end Todd Heap and former Ohio State quarterback Joe Germaine are alums. Heap, Wheeler remembers, could snatch 200 lbs. and clean 280 lbs. despite his 6-foor-5 frame.

“We’ve been so good for so long, the community expects it every year,” he said. “But I get the biggest kick out of being here for the kids.”

Mike Burgener
Strength and Conditioning Coach
Rancho Buena Vista High School
Vista, Calif.
2003 football team: semifinals of CIF San Diego playoffs

It’s early in the morning, and the football players at Rancho Buena Vista High School are doing sit-ups. Standing over them is a drill sergeant, literally. Straight out of “Full Metal Jacket,” Mike Burgener sings out a call he learned as an officer in the Marine Corps.

“Heyyyy, Bo Diddley!” Burgener calls out.

The players respond, mimicking the coach as they pull up on their sit-ups.

As the strength and conditioning coach at Rancho Buena Vista High School in Vista, Calif., a suburb of San Diego, Burgener puts his unique past to good use. A man who openly admits that “boot camp wasn’t really that hard for me” puts his players through the ringer, Marine Corps-style.

Burgener stresses Olympic-style weight lifting such as the clean and jerk, but also uses more medieval methods. RBV players throw medicine balls and carry kettle bells to gain strength. A select few players even get invited to Burgener’s house, where they push a 320-lb. wheelbarrow up the coach’s driveway or lift from one of the four platforms in his garage.

“It’s hard-core strength the old-fashioned way,” Burgener said.

Burgener’s approach comes from his past. He grew up on a farm in Marion, Ill., where he hitched horses, shoveled hay and delivered milk. A former Marine Corps officer, Burgener played for coach Ara Parseghian on the 1966 Notre Dame championship team and graduated with a Master’s degree in exercise physiology from Kentucky in 1972.

“I like to say that I beg, borrow and steal everything I can from others’ programs,” he said. “My students, my athletes, my former coaches, they all help teach me.”

Still, Burgener’s program is definitely unique. He greets football players at 6 a.m. at least twice a week so that there is time for other athletes in the weight room.

“My whole teaching career is based on the Marines Corps,” said Burgener, who is a senior international weightlifting coach for the United States Weightlifting Federation. “I don’t ask kids to do anything I haven’t done myself. They know I’m hard-core, and they respect that.

“Plus, I’m a little nuts, anyway.”