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Johnny Parker is being inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame on Saturday, and the story starts 65 years ago with a set of weights from his parents. The instruction book told him to measure himself first: 5-foot-11, 105 pounds, 10-inch arms. He could only lift the bar. "I was so skinny you could almost see through me," Parker has said. "I had no self-esteem, no confidence in myself."

He added 75 pounds of muscle, became a starting lineman, and started a career that ran through South Carolina - where he was the school's first strength coach in 1976 - then Indiana, LSU and Ole Miss, with a study trip to Russia to learn from Olympic coaches along the way. In 1984 Bill Parcells, on Bobby Knight's recommendation, hired him as the Giants' first strength and conditioning coach. New York went from 3-12-1 to 14-2 and a Super Bowl title in three years, and Parcells called the strength program the most crucial element of the turnaround - his players were bigger, stronger and more durable, but the bigger point was different: "The weight program has unified our team."

Parker finished with four Super Bowl appearances and three rings. Now 79 and fighting cancer, he's too sick to travel to his own induction; his remarks will be played on tape. "Good coaches coach football," he says in them. "Great coaches coach people."

Luke Toburen runs Virginia men's basketball on three rules. First, do no harm: nothing that remotely risks an athlete's availability on a given day. Second, availability itself - "the more I can make our best players available, whether that's for practices, individual sessions with coaches, games and for lifts, that puts us in the best position possible to win more games. And so that's how I can impact wins and losses, and that's kind of how I'm going to judge myself."

Only once those are met does he chase deficits: speed, agility, body awareness, size, robustness for athletes with injury history. He's also blunt about following Mike Curtis, telling his GAs day one, "Don't expect me to be MC, because I'm not." Toburen says he uses data to inform his decisions but doesn't get as technical, and puts his own strength elsewhere: "being extremely relational with the guys and developing trust."

Undrafted in 2023, taken 162nd in 2024, then a broken clavicle six games into his final junior season - Anthony Romani has taken the long way. His strength coach of five years, Dan Noble, says the player who first walked into his gym was "very immature and really raw" and hadn't committed to the strength and conditioning piece, and is direct about what was holding him back:

"The one thing that he was missing was kind of the strength and power side of things and just the overall acceleration and athleticism." Training alongside pros including Mitch Marner, that changed. Romani also picked Michigan State in large part for its strength and sports science staff and the individualized plan built for him, and after his freshman year Noble's read is simple: "he's just at a different level altogether right now."

UTRGV promoted Chase Haselhorst to associate strength and conditioning coach entering his sixth season with the Vaqueros. He oversees strength and conditioning for baseball and men's and women's tennis.

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