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Good morning. The Raiders hand out a weight room award that isn't decided by what anyone lifts, performance coaches at Texas Tech, LSU and Penn State open up about their readiness process, and Boston University's strength coach walks through how he builds an NHL summer. Let's get into it...
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The Raiders hand out a trophy each offseason called the Samson, and the training staff doesn't award it on numbers. It goes to the player who showed up most consistently through the offseason lifting program and did the most to pull others along with him. This year it went to second-year defensive tackle Tonka Hemingway, who skipped going home to South Carolina and was in the building by late January.
What head strength and conditioning coach A.J. Neibel points to isn't the lifting. "He's doing all the right things not just in the weight room, but also in the athletic training room in terms of recovery, learning his routine," Neibel said. Hemingway plays at 284 pounds against interior linemen well over 300.
Aaron Uzzell, Ashley Kowalewski and Ben Moortgat are sitting down August 12 to walk through how their programs make readiness and monitoring decisions day to day. Uzzell is Texas Tech's assistant AD for strength and conditioning, Kowalewski works with LSU's Olympic sports, primarily volleyball and women's tennis, and Moortgat is Penn State's director of speed and performance science. They'll cover what they're tracking in Whistle, what's changed since they started using it, and what they wish they'd known sooner. A live product walkthrough closes it out. 11am ET. Register now
Ken Whittier, Boston University's associate head strength and conditioning coach, has nine NHL players training with him this summer alongside both BU hockey teams. He builds the summer in three-week blocks, and each block is harder than the one before it.
The first three weeks are slow on purpose. Light loads, controlled tempo, nothing explosive. "You can't remodel muscles, soft tissue structures, tendon structures, ligament structures doing dynamic work first," Whittier said. The next three weeks go after strength by keeping muscles under load longer - split squats held at the bottom for a full minute, worked up to three minutes by the end of the block. Speed and power only come after that: timed 15-yard sprints, sled and chase sprints, a 1080 Sprint that pays out resistance off a coiled cord and measures the output, and flywheel squats where a harder push up means more eccentric load coming down.
Two things he does are specific to hockey. He separates lower body into hip-dominant and knee-dominant days, and he'd rather have players do single-leg split squats than back squats, since they already spend a season bent forward. He also uses overcoming isometrics as a primer rather than a lift - five seconds pushing hard against something that won't move, then straight into a jump. "Think of it as a dimmer switch," Whittier said.
The Athletic put a question to mental performance coaches working in MLB, the PGA Tour and the NFL: what small habit would move the needle most? Three answers stood out.
The takeaways:
Seattle Mariners mental performance coach Adam Bernero asks for five to 10 minutes with no phone, in another room. He offers it as the step before meditation, which players routinely refuse
Phillies coach Traci Statler runs a daily journal she calls P.O.V. - a plan for the day that has to be granular and achievable, the outcome of it, then the value of what actually got done
Travis Thomas, formerly with the US men's national team, redirects athletes off confidence entirely. He asks whether they've ever felt confident and played badly, or nervous and played well. Most say yes to both, so he points them at two or three behaviors instead
North Carolina defensive tackle Leroy Jackson told reporters the Tar Heels' conditioning is in better shape this year, and credited head strength coach Moses Cabrera. "He definitely put us through it with everything he does," Jackson said. Cabrera is in his second season at UNC after eight with the New England Patriots, most of them under Bill Belichick.
📸 Perform Better
Rhode Island hired Jared Shibley as an assistant strength and conditioning coach. He'll work with golf, swimming and diving, women's track and field, and volleyball. He arrives from Maine, where he was head sports performance coach for the football program and handled nutrition coaching for that roster.
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