☕️ S&C Daily — Arm in Arm With the Strength Coach

October 30, 2026

USC has taken the field arm in arm this season, and director of football sports performance Trumain Carroll walks directly to Lincoln Riley’s left. Riley said he wanted Carroll up front because of his role in the program. “It’s a super important position in college football,” Riley said.

Carroll was credited with helping a cultural overhaul at Kansas State that led to a 2022 Big 12 title, and USC hired him ahead of the 2025 season. In his first full offseason, he worked to get the Trojans into Big Ten shape. Defensive tackles Jide Abasiri and Jamaal Jarrett each lost 15 pounds, offensive lineman Elijah Vaikona dropped 25, and 42 players added mass.

In a new Sportsmith interview, Mike Potenza, the San Jose Sharks' director of high performance, walks through how his staff tracks load every day, with heart rate as the base. At the end of each day, the performance, medical and coaching staffs ask four questions: how much did we do, was it on target, how did the players respond and can we do what's planned for tomorrow. The post-practice report shades every player's workload red, yellow or green against his own yearly numbers, and the staff caps training load the day before games.

Top speed has a deadline. The staff compares each player's sprint speeds from games, tracked by the league, with his practice speeds from its Catapult ClearSky system. The goal is for every player to touch above 90% of his top speed within seven days. Anyone who hasn't hit it in a 3-7 day window gets a planned top-up sprint block at the next available practice.

A new study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research put 30 trained young men into three groups for 11 weeks: endurance only, lifting only, or lifting plus endurance. The lifting focused on max strength for five weeks, then explosive strength for six.

The lifting-only group got stronger on a leg press max strength test, up 18.4%, and jumped better, up 12.7%. The lifting plus endurance group didn’t get stronger on that max strength test, but still jumped better, up 8.8%. The authors conclude endurance work can be added without hurting explosive performance, as long as the lifting is built around rapid strength.

Two athletes have gone viral lately for how they handle pressure, and they come at it from opposite ends. Bears quarterback Caleb Williams starts with his body. He was caught humming between plays on Thursday Night Football and said it calms him. Breathing coach Patrick McKeown told The Athletic that humming forces a long, slow exhale, which stimulates the vagus nerve and slows breathing just as pressure speeds it up.

Flames goalie Devin Cooley starts with his mind. He says his “conscious brain is really bad at playing goalie,” so he lets his unconscious brain react. Performance psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais told ESPN that’s the right instinct: the conscious mind is for learning, not performing, and athletes can train it to trust the non-conscious through the drills they do in practice. One slows his breathing, the other gets out of his own way, and both are after the same thing: staying calm enough to react.

Muhlenberg runs strength and conditioning for all 22 of its teams with three coaches, and director Darin Thomas said a typical workout takes him 45 minutes to an hour to plan.

Springfield College head strength and conditioning coach Jeff Stern leads six young assistants, each covering three to four teams for 760-plus athletes, and the school’s strength and conditioning graduate program is the biggest it’s ever been.

🎁 Giveaway: To celebrate passing 10,000 Instagram followers, we’re teaming up with Caffeine & Kilos to give away 5 bags of PR Blend. It’s free to enter: follow @themorningrep and @caffeineandkilos on Instagram and drop your email here. Tag a coach who runs on caffeine for a bonus entry. Winner announced Nov. 6. US only.

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