☕️ S&C Daily — They Learned to Handle the Hard Better

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In a new piece from The Athletic on how NHL players build a summer, most of the training traces back to a movement they almost never do in a game. Boston University’s Ken Whittier, who trains NHL players alongside both BU hockey teams, walks through what he does with a countermovement jump once he has the numbers.

A force plate splits the jump in two. The way down reads braking, the way up reads propulsion, and the gap between them picks the exercise. Strong propulsion with weak braking goes to flywheel squats. The reverse goes to explosive step-ups.

“I might have someone who’s the strongest guy on the team. He can deadlift 500 pounds,” Whittier said. “But if it takes him all day to pick up the weight, does that translate to sport?”

The jumping gets programmed in phases too. Three weeks of box jumps where the athlete has to stick the landing, then single jumps over hurdles, then a series of them, with single-leg hops, bounding and trap bar jumps worked in alongside sprints. Bruins forward Tanner Jeannot runs a heavy squat and then goes to hurdles or a band-assisted jump. “It feels like you’re flying.”

Hawkin Dynamics founder Ben Watson, whose company sells the plates, points to a second use. Jump height barely moves across a season because tired players compensate to protect it, dipping about two millimeters deeper to borrow elastic energy without deciding to. A daily jump catches that. A coach watching can’t.

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In a new On3 interview, Vanderbilt strength and conditioning coach Robert Stiner explains how a player's training age governs both what he lifts and how specific it gets. Year one is linear periodization, work capacity and general strength on movements that apply to everyone. Year two pushes the strength ceiling. Undulating and conjugate schemes come later, once there's a base to absorb them, and the work gets more position-specific the further along a player is.

What he checks it all against is whether it shows up on Saturday. "If strength doesn't serve speed or power, then we're just strong for the sake of being strong," he said. For linemen he makes it a stopwatch. The ball is snapped and contact happens at the line in about 0.46 seconds. "How strong are you in .46 seconds?"

Dennis Love put Clemson on the dikes at Lake Hartwell at 6am on summer Fridays, and the number went up every week. Week one was two runs up a roughly 80-foot hill, and Love says Corian Gipson almost passed out. By the last week before camp the team was running sixteen. “It didn’t get any easier,” Dabo Swinney said. “They just learned how to handle the hard better.”

Love also added two staffers, Anthony Lazard from Stanford and DuJuan Sharp from Tennessee State as director of analytics.

UT Arlington announced the hiring of Alex Cosse as an assistant strength and conditioning coach, working mainly with men’s basketball. He arrives from Incarnate Word, where he had run sport performance for the men’s basketball program since December 2024. Before that he was an assistant at James Madison and interned at North Carolina and Tulane.

Cornell has announced Ben Fleet as an assistant strength and conditioning coach for football.

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University of Denver

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