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AFM Magazine


Strong Beliefs: A Key Ingredient in the Success of a Strength & Conditioning Pro

Samson\'s High School Strength & Conditioning Coaches of the Year
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D I-AA: Kyle Speer • Sam Houston State

Kyle Speer has been the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Sam Houston State University for three years. He has one assistant coach, Brian Wiseman, working with him, and together the two are responsible for 16 sports with more than 350 athletes. In 2005 and 2006, Sam Houston State won the Commissioner’s Cup Championship Award, which is a performance-based award for the best overall athletic program in the Southland Conference. Speer and Wiseman take great pride in that award and they believe the rewards at the end start with the hard work in the beginning.

“We want to improve athleticism using specific training methods, both in the weight room and on the conditioning field based upon sport, position, training age, etc.” he said. “We use ground based, multi-joint athletic movements with an emphasis on the Olympic lifts. Supplemental lifts are selected to complement that days major lifts and to balance out the athlete’s development. Our speed and conditioning program is divided up based on objectives for that training phase. Days that emphasize speed and agility are done prior to the strength training session. Strength training is performed first on days when conditioning is a priority.

“We utilize a clock and whistle to control the training session in both the strength program and the speed and conditioning program. We feel that this keeps the athlete focused on the task at hand. We are constantly striving for a highly focused, very intense, and proficient training atmosphere,” Speer said. “This method can be rigid and unforgiving; however we will not hesitate to make any necessary adjustments to maintain the intensity and focus of the training session. I really believe that the athletes today want to be challenged. They want to leave the training session knowing that they were challenged and that they worked hard and gave it their best.”

And one size does not fit all at Sam Houston State. “We divide the football team into three major groups: Line (OL, DL), Big Skill (TE, LB, FB), and Skill (DB, WR, RB, QB),” Speer said. “We train these groups separately with very few class scheduling exceptions. We give the athletes programs with percentages based on their current training maxes on our main lifts and target weights on the supplemental lifts. Each player has their own workout program that is issued on a weekly basis. There are different programs for different positions, and we can specialize and individualize the programs as well.”

It all sounds like serious business, because in many aspects it is. But Speer also likes to keep it interesting which also has its rewards.

“We like to create a little competition within our football program and I took something that I saw Coach Gerard Martin at Connecticut present at a clinic and adapted it to fit the needs of our program” Speer said. “10 captains are chosen and they each draft a team from the remaining guys on the roster. These teams compete once a week in a round-robin style tournament the last four weeks of the winter off season. Head Coach Todd Whitten and his staff are in charge of running each individual station and they love the fact that they can get outside and watch their players work hard and compete” Speer said. “The teams compete against each other in five different competitive drills and a scoring system is used to determine the overall winning team.”

This type of program also helps the players challenge each other to get better and keeps the competitive spark ignited.

D-II: Matt Mitchell • Grand Valley State

Matt Mitchell has been the strength and conditioning coach at Grand Valley State in Michigan for the past three years. He also is the team’s linebacker coach for a team that has a 28 game winning streak and won back-to-back D-II Championships. “Strength and conditioning is a lot like the game of football in that you see a lot of different styles,” Mitchell said. “There are different ways to produce similar results. The key is that what you do the coaches have to believe in it and the players have to believe in it. If the players believe in it, then we can focus on technique and other issues instead of trying to sell them on what we are doing.”

When in the weight room, Mitchell likes to stress a lot of the Olympic lifts in his program.

“We want to be ground based, multi-joint and explosive,” he said. “When they are in the weight room we want their feet on the ground, just like they are on the football field. The kids learn a lot about balance and multi-joint movement. You are just a lot more effective with your feet on the ground.

“We are very big on multi-joint movements. We are not big on biceps curls or triceps extensions. We believe more in what is called functional strength.”

The difficult part of implementing a functional strength program is that “you have to have a clue in what you’re doing,” he said.

“It takes effort and time in both the coaches and kids parts to be proficient in these workouts,” said Mitchell, who is a certified strength and conditioning coach through the NSCA and a club coach certified through USA Weightlifting. “What we do, I think as good as anyone, is teaching our kids and more importantly when our kids are in the weight room we make sure they have a proper load on the bar. We have a trained eye that can look at what a kid is lifting and know if it’s not enough or too much.”

To judge the proper load comes down to technique and the way the bar is moving.

“If they don’t have enough weight on the bar, then the bar is floating at the top end of the lift,” he said. “At the same time if they are having a difficult time getting the bar up and getting the bar moving there is too much weight on the bar. And it’s a fine line between the two. Some of our kids don’t put enough weight on the bar when they’re doing cleans and the bar is floating way too much at the top. When they really pop their hips and the bar is moving up it’s floating way too much at the top and we can tell that just watching it.”

Mitchell, who credits spending some time at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs for making him better at his job, says they also like to do certain things outside the weight room. “The game of football is not played in a telephone booth so we want to have our guys know how to operate in some space,” he said. “We do a lot of speed development work, especially in the summer. We want our players working on changing direction and the technique for that.”

Variety also is a key to success at Grand Valley State. “There is some fundamental things we believe in but at the same time we try to change up the lifts to keep things fresh. But at our core, we are Olympic lifters. That’s what we believe in.”

D-III: Lee Munger • Wisconsin-Whitewater

Lee Munger has bounced back and forth between South Dakota and Wisconsin for what seems like decades. But it really hasn’t been that long. Munger was hired as strength and conditioning coach at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater before the start of the 2005-2006 academic year.

A graduate of South Dakota State University where he was a four year letter winner in football, Munger earned his Master’s Degree from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse before becoming the head strength and conditioning coach at South Dakota State from 2003 to 2005.

Munger’s background may seem at first irrelevant. But it’s actually one of the keys to his success. “I come from a very small town in South Dakota that played nine-man football,” he said. “My dream was to play college football and I worked very hard at it and made it happen. I am proof of what hard work can do.”

And Munger didn’t exactly have a state-of-the-art facility to train in while in high school. But he had something much more important – desire. Many coaches – both in high school and even colleges – have to work with less than adequate equipment, but if coaches can convince their players that desire is more important, they will see impressive results.

Munger became the first strength and conditioning coach at South Dakota State, working with all 20 teams at the school. “They created a position for me and I took that as both a great challenge and a great responsibility,” he said. “The first thing I did was build relationships with the coaches. I wanted to know what they did in previous years, what worked and what didn’t. And then create my program off of that.”

Munger says a good strength and conditioning coach can’t come with his own plan of how to do things. “You have to be open minded and listen to the coaches and learn what style they use and model your style after that,” he said. “It’s a combination of everyone’s ideas that ends up making the best program.”

Another key component to a successful strength and conditioning program revolves around time. “You just don’t hand a player a program and then see him in two months,” said Munger. “You have to be in the weight room with him, watching his technique, watching his progress. We always have a trained person in the weight room with the athletes.”

Munger stresses the key components to a good program: strength, power and explosiveness. “One area we focus on that really is a weak point in college athletics is in flexibility,” he said. “Core development is another area we focus on. The back, the hips and abdominals is where the power comes from. You can’t spend enough time on these areas.”

As for diet and proper nutrition: “We give them all the information they need and it’s up to them to follow the plan,” he said. “They know they have to take care of their bodies. That’s a given for a college athlete these days.”

NAIA: Trevor Miller • St. Francis (IN)

Trevor Miller is a reluctant winner of the Samson’s Strength and Conditioning award. But that reluctance is based on a key ingredient to running a successful strength and conditioning program.

Miller took over the position last year left vacant when USF grad James Bettcher accepted a graduate assistant position with Bowling Green State University.

“He did a tremendous job here and he created an environment that people respected,” Miller said. “I came in and took over a very motivated weight room. That made my job a lot easier.”

Creating that motivated atmosphere is key when trying to build a strong strength and conditioning program. “Kids have to believe in what you do,” said Miller, who was at Morehead State University in Morehead, KY., the last two seasons and also coached the offensive line at St. Francis. “And the guys before me here did that so I can’t really take credit for this program.”

Miller does bring his own style to St. Francis. “The strength part of the program is pretty standard, but the basic field stuff we do and the running program is something I put together based on the different programs I have been exposed to over the years,” he said. “It’s a combination of different methods I’ve learned.”

For example, St. Francis doesn’t do any long distance running.

“We do a lot of football specific work,” he said. “We keep all our conditioning times within football specific rest periods for the most part. Sometimes during the year we do normal running and conditioning.” In the summertime, Miller will give his players a base of conditioning for the first few weeks.

“But then we will get right into the football specific agility and sprints and trying to build their top end speed,” he said. “We have over 100 guys on the roster and two guys working in the weight room so we don’t have time to hand out specific programs for each player. We basically build a workout that will work for the entire team.”

In the off-season Miller spends a lot of time working on Olympic lifts, power cleans and hang cleans, which are a big part of the workouts. “Push presses too,” he said. “We try to really work with triple extension. Ankle, knees and hips and trying to get them explosive.”

Results of their program depends on the athlete. “It’s different for every player,” he said. “Some players respond pretty quickly. Usually with the Olympic lifts, form is a big factor. Once they learn how to do the lift correctly, it’s usually when we will see their biggest gain over the course of the next couple of months.”

As most strength coaches will tell you technique is very important. “Just power clean specifically technique is very important because the transfer of the weight and what you’re trying to do is trying to build explosion,” he said. “We really try to stress, especially on our lighter sessions, that they’re actually leaving the ground and being that quick with the bar speed.”

JUCO: Steve Braet • Butler Community College

Steve Braet isn’t like most college strength and conditioning coaches. Most coaches are preparing players for the moment – trying to get the most out of that player’s potential and hopefully helping the team achieve its goals. Most college coaches have four years to help a player reach that potential.

But Braet isn’t like most coaches. Because he teaches at a junior college and only gets a player for two years at the most, he has half the time to accomplish his goals – and even those goals are different. “There is a lot of added motivation for the kids who come here because of the opportunity to go on,” Braet said. “You see guys really hitting the books, you see guys working hard in the weight room because there is an opportunity here to go on to another level.”

Braet says the strength and conditioning program he puts together for athletes is different than one would see at a four-year school.

“We get kids here who are 17 and 18 and their bodies are still maturing,” Braet said. “We do a lot of things for foot dexterity and quickness. We teach the technique of lifting. For example, show them that just by moving your finger on a lateral raise you hit a completely different muscle. We try to help them through that maturing phase. A lot of what we’re doing is working the individual muscle because the game has changed since we all started playing. Now there’s people that aren’t lined head-up on you, instead they are lined up on an outside shade so you want to know that you individually strengthen the appropriate muscle. There’s a lot more that goes into this than lifting dumbbells.”

Braet, in his 27th year at Butler, also is the assistant head football coach and defensive line coach. A recipient of the AFLAC Assistant Coach of the Year Award in 2001, Braet is widely recognized as one of the top defensive line coaches in the country. He came to Butler in 1979 where he served as defensive line coach until 1981. The following year, he became Wichita State University's defensive line coach for the 1982 and 1983 seasons. In 1983, Braet returned to Butler, where he has won four national championships (1981, 1998, 1999 and 2003).

Braet is similar to most coaches in one way – he doesn’t take credit for winning those championships. “It all comes down to the players,” he says. “The program you put together can be the greatest program on paper but it means nothing without the kids’ effort. It only works if the players come out and attack this program.”

And success does help motivate the players. “They take pride in our program because they have seen the success with the guys we have had that have won here and then had the opportunity to go on,” Braet said.

Over the years, Braet has had the opportunity to not only attend clinics all over the country, but to meet and talk with other coaches and see how they do things. All of this “networking” has helped him improve his program. “The coaching profession is taking and borrowing from everybody and that’s how I have created my program,” Braet said. “I like to start with the hip area, the center core area because everything in football revolves throughout your hips – coming out of your stance, 40-yard sprints, explosion out of your stance. Everything comes out of that middle area so you need to start there.”

One of the suggestions he offers to fellow coaches is to keep up with the latest trends and keep talking to other coaches and “pick their brains.”

“I do a lot of recruiting and I am always talking to football coaches and learning how they do things,” he said. “When you talk to coaches, listen and keep your eyes open. You can learn a lot and it will only help your own program.” Even though Braet has been coaching for more than 27 years, he is still learning.

High School: Jeff Dicus • Lake Travis High School, Austin TX

What do you change when you inherit a football team coming off a two-season 1-19 record? The easy answer of course is everything. Lake Travis (TX) High School coach Jeff Dicus knew he couldn’t do that overnight so he set priorities.

Among those at the top of his list was immediately creating a can-do, disciplined work ethic, not an easy task for a program with such a dismal recent past.

The other was more tangible, a state-of-the-art 9,600 square foot strength and conditioning training facility with the finest equipment and dedicated coaching where his athletes would be surrounded by a wall to wall look and feel of a winner. It was a message to his players and the entire student body that the Cavaliers had indeed turned the corner with a bright future on the horizon. It didn’t take long to see the results.

“We started talking positively to our kids,” Dicus said. “We told them from day one we’re going to start acting, talking and being a champion. Our first year (2003) we were 3-7. Then we went 8-3, 11-1 and 8-3 (for a four season record of 30-14). Our kids now understand the benefits of what happens from December to August as far as conditioning themselves and what is necessary to get to the next level.

“In the summer we have a Summer Cavs Conditioning Program. Our first year we had 250 kids, this year it was 360. We put them through sit ups, agilities. jump ropes and plyometrics. It’s for all our athletes, not just football and it’s for boys and girls.

“We now have a weight room that is 9,600 square feet, supposedly one of the largest of any high school in the country. We have 148 kids in our football program now, 9th through 12th grade and they all lift in the morning between 7 and 8:30 am. Because of the size of our room we can accommodate all these kids. Our old weight room was 5,000 square feet at most so we had to split the workouts between morning and afternoon. We’re big on power clean, hang clean and Olympic lift programs. Every day our kids come in and do some form of Olympic lifting whether it be dumbbell push press to dumbbell snatches to regular snatches to power cleans to a split jerk.”

Dicus gives special attention to his linebacking corp. “Our linebackers have to concentrate heavily on all our core lifts, which are the squat, lunge and front squat. For our hamstring work we do a lot of hyperextension, upper body-wise. We believe heavily in the bench and incline and all the dumbbell work. Dicus also has the linebackers doing medicine ball and push presses partnered up.

“Our LBs have to be quick. They move pretty much in a 10x10 area. We work on sprint techniques. We also do agilities twice a week where we do jump ropes, different types of station work and plyometrics.”

High School: James Burk • First Baptist Academy, Dallas, TX

James Burk’s belief in the value of strength and conditioning dates back to his playing days as an offensive lineman at Abilene Christian University and Hardin-Simmons. “As a player I always thought strength and conditioning was the great genetic equalizer,” says Burk, now head football coach at the First Baptist Academy in Dallas. “Maybe it’s because I never had surgery during my entire playing career. Now I think the term S&C doesn’t really do it justice. Here we do more power development. I call it general athletic development.”

Whatever the terminology you choose there are enormous benefits to the importance of having your players in the best possible physical condition. “For one thing,” Burk notes, “strength and conditioning prevents injuries. For another, it helps you get faster, even for the guys who don’t enjoy running. If they become stronger they can apply more force into the ground which makes them faster.

“It also increases your self confidence. The bigger you are, the stronger you are and the better they feel when they walk on the field. It also works on team chemistry. When you’re in there together, sweating together, pushing each other, seeing each other make improvements, it carries over to the field especially when it comes to summer training when you’re putting in those hours in that heat. It’s like trench warfare mentality.”

War or peace, an effective offense starts upfront where the offensive linemen open holes and keep the quarterback on his feet. “We do a lot of pass protection,” Burk says. “That starts with a lot of punch work where you stand up with a dumbbell in each hand and punch similar to pass protection where we’re moving our feet. There’s a lot of medicine ball punches, sandbag punches and tricep work. All so we can keep that defender from getting to our QB. And don’t forget footwork. You really pass block with your feet where you must stay in front of the pass rusher.

“We use the quick foot ladder to improve our footwork which is a series of eight to ten little boxes where we do drills to learn to fire your feet as fast as possible. It’s similar to the old running ropes except these are flat to the ground so you don’t have guys tripping and messing up the drill.

“We also put our offensive linemen through Thera-Band shuffles. The Thera-Band is like a big rubber band that we wrap around their ankles and have them do shuffles with them so they keep tension on the band. If they don’t keep the tension then their feet are too close. It’s a teaching tool to the offensive linemen that their feet should never touch or cross.

“There’s another thing we do with our OL to help them gain good weight. We call it our hypertrophy phase which is where we’re trying to gain muscle when we increase the number of sets or reps in a workout.”





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