Episode Summary
This episode features Zach Fears and explores his work in collegiate sports performance at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. The conversation points to the responsibilities that come with leading athlete development across a department, from training design and daily implementation to long-term planning and facility use.
It also gives listeners a useful look at how performance leadership requires both technical coaching and broader organizational thinking. Coaches working in college settings will find value in the discussion around infrastructure, athlete support, and building a process that can serve a full roster of teams well.
For strength and conditioning staffs, this episode is also a reminder that facility design and coaching systems work together. The best training environment supports clear movement between stations, reliable access to equipment, and enough organization for coaches to teach without fighting the room. Zach Fears‘ perspective gives young coaches a practical window into what it looks like to balance athlete needs, staff communication, and the daily realities of a collegiate weight room.
The discussion is useful for anyone thinking about how equipment selection, room layout, and staff expectations affect day-to-day training quality. A well-run facility makes it easier for coaches to move groups efficiently, keep standards visible, and give athletes the repetition they need to improve.
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Browse the full Samson Strength Coach Collective podcast archive for more conversations with coaches, practitioners, and performance leaders.
welcome to the samson strength coach collective podcast i’m your host anthony grasso we are joined today by zach fears who is the assistant a d of sport performance at southeastern oklahoma state i’ll give you a little background on zach he’s got his bachelor’s in exercise science from central college which is in pella iowa he’s got his masters from winona state and he’s also halfway through his doctorate in strategic leadership which we’ll touch on and get into in a little bit here uh he is strength coach trained the conditioning coach certified to the cscca and he is a certified training conditioning specialist through the nsca he also holds a a certification from usa weightlifting it’s probably as good as i was gonna as good as i was gonna get i think i messed up the last podcaster like i said it’s always brutal when we get both those certifications but just
to give you a little bit of background uh name some of the place that he’s been to you got lincoln university missouri southern state nc state winona state abilene christian and he was the director of score performance at sterling sports performance in also in pella iowa so zach welcome i really appreciate you hopping on short notice i know this is obviously a busy time of year for you so again thank you and welcome appreciate it yeah no doubt so um like we talked if you could just kind of obviously i mentioned some of those place that you’ve been but if you really like we always like to start off just give a little bit of background some context to listeners um where this whole thing started how it kind of led to where you’re at now yeah so i originally got started at central college uh back in the day there’s still a bunch of us around uh from central college and we were
kind of doing what springfield college was doing right now back you know 10 15 years ago so i remember my senior year as i got out we had 32 interns there at one point so you know we were we were wrong with that and uh the director there is probably the guy i referenced most still my career jake anderson kind of had a vision of putting this big internship program together and just rolling with it and that’s what he did and he was kind of this larger than life character uh he created some interesting stuff there but it really got a lot of us deep into this you know just this craziness that is strength conditioning and so what he kind of did was he kind of molded us all kind of the same that’s one thing you know maybe i’d do it a little differently you know i try to have all my my interns and i i right now i have about 15 interns um but i like to kind of mold them all a
little bit different and use their strengths but it was pretty crazy how we all had this just one philosophy i think we almost thought that it was there’s only one way to do it that’s one thing that was really interesting is the way it kind of just got us all to do the exact same thing uh work together and that that really got me into it i originally went to school i was going to play sports and do all that i end up getting weightlifting a few other things and just to be honest with you i i never end up playing sports in college and i get that non-stop because i’m i’m about 5’7 220 i’m a pretty stout guy everyone’s like running back like weightlifter you know um what ended up happening was i kind of got the bug especially my junior year i had a couple people trying to talk me into it earlier and i was like no this isn’t for me i need to put some size on i’m going to
play football and then the next thing i know i’m a strength edition coach uh undergrad and then i took over a private business for a year uh i should go back to honestly jake anderson’s still the biggest impact in my entire life and i hear that non-stop and every time i get to hear from the guy message guy guy he’s actually a missionary in turkey right now so every time i get him hear from this guy it’s a joy you know to see where we all came from and honestly i find myself more and more as i get older acting like him because i’m about his age right now when he left central which is kind of funny to me now after almost 15 years in the field but uh and then i moved on i actually ran my own private business for a year under uh at a pt clinic there under travis sterling that’s my external performance um it wasn’t for me no private business the private sector is not for me i learned
that real quick it’s just there’s when you have to charge for everything you know you’re charging for all the advice you can give that’s not for me i’d rather just get my salary and then try to get as much knowledge as i can out there uh after that i went down to nc state for a while uh probably learned more than i’ve ever learned that was the first time i really got challenged i’ll never forget todd rice was the director there todd rice was i mean he was tough to work for but he was always consistent that would give him that and he was as knowledgeable as any coach so he was the one who really got me thinking outside the box that that’s probably the credit i get the most at nc state um d’antonio burnett was one of the assistants there he’s now the director over there um and i credit that guy with a whole lot of knowledge as well you know as a couple other coaches that were there um
it was just a really interesting experience to look at a totally different way again i at central quality where i’m molded here and nc state is way over here totally different setup totally different design everything like that i should also mention craig buckland greg buckley is at bryant right now and he was another really really impactful guy on me while i was there but he really taught me to think outside the box and i’ve never forget he said i forbade him he said this only side one day ago zach stop thinking like everybody else will do like everybody else figure out your reason why you would write a program in a way and that was probably the most impactful thing anybody ever said because at central we all did it this way we all used a similar template we all did everything the same way and he finally he just told me like stop doing what all the coaches you’ve ever
been under about do what makes sense to you and that really molded me to do totally different things with how i actually started building my career from there i went to work on the state ga for two years it was it was totally different it’s very loose culture it was kind of like that here’s your teams we’re never gonna do anything as a staff like you got free didn’t do whatever you want so it was kind of crazy because you’re sitting there and out from nc state where it was like if you looked at todd rice the wrong way you know you didn’t breathe down your throat uh jeff bernardi who was just like take care of your teams do you want to see my programs no just go and then to swing down to evelyn christian with eric overland and he was the exact same way as todd rice you know he was everything in this little tiny nutshell do it exactly this way so it was really
one of those topsy-turvy rides yeah i was gonna say there’s some like wild experiences there oh and then i go back to missouri southern i was under troy jorgensen we obviously worked for samson now there i was there for about two and a half years close to three years and he was exact opposite of take care of your teams you know we’re not going to read books together not do anything like that together and so it was to get us back up and back down and really easy life um i was there had some really good experiences there i met some really good coaches but i knew after a while that was all i wanted to look forward to position got the opportunity to lincoln uh lincoln is tough it’s really tough it’s you know it’s an interesting school i won’t say anything negative it was just you had to do things totally different you know from anywhere i’ve ever been and it was
my first head gig so i’m kind of throw right in the deep end and honestly i thought it went really well overall for my first head job and it set me up to be here you know i got here after about a year i got promoted assistant athletic director here um simply for working hard i think is all i’m going to say i’m never going to do any more details than that but being consistent working hard that was something that really helped me out focus wise same time we built a brand new facility here we got a 10 000 square foot facility for division two um completely sampsoned out um nice ads bbts cheap flights great timing everything i mean for division two you know i talked to you know a handful division one coaches in the last you know a couple weeks just buddies here and there and i remember cleve mcleod was one of them and i told him the whole situation just talking to
him and you know he mentioned uh you know a certain thing about another job or anything like that and i told him everything that happened he’s like dude why would you ever leave that you’ve got a great boss you got great coaches you’ve got an amazing facility he said man just stay there take care of business and you know and then uh but yeah it’s an amazing place here overall you know durant’s not the most hip happening place but i got a wife and three kids and i don’t really believe the craziest lifestyle plus i’m in the middle of my doctorate so you know i don’t really have time to do much of anything i gotta six yesterday and i left here about 11 o’clock last night um so there’s been a lot of those unfortunately yeah but i’m halfway down i guess so yeah not all a’s but one b so i guess i’m doing all right yeah man you’re doing some serious stuff over there i was
gonna say halfway through your doctorate and all that your name all these things you got going on i’m thinking myself how did this dude even like remotely have any time to hop on this podcast with me or that’s all i’m thinking like while i’m here so i i’m even more appreciative now for sure and yeah going back to your experience i mean unbelievable obviously like you said that that that emotional rollercoaster of like different qualities and different environments that you were in going from a place where obviously you know maybe culture was extremely emphasized and the environment that you were in was very you know unity driven right to go into like all right well now it’s you know a little bit more of a militarized situation where it’s like you said like don’t even look at the head guy don’t even breathe near him you know and then it’s like all right now we’re you know
we’re back in just do your thing you know what i mean like take care of your teams and all that kind of stuff so um that probably leads really well into your your doctor right because you’ve seen like probably like five or six different forms of leadership right so you don’t talk about the strategic leadership i mean you’ve got i think i think you’ve got enough for a doctorate there you know it was just based on experience alone and i think you know obviously your ability to you know absorb what has happened now as you’ve moved on from it and everything has probably gotten better and better so um that’s that’s pretty awesome and yeah you mentioned you know hard work and just consistent work ethic obviously led you to being a head guy who who would have thought amazing stuff right you know it’s like not not that not that sexy right just just working hard and
making sure that you take care of business right that’s awesome um so yeah man let’s let’s get into it so like i mean obviously we we would love to hear your thoughts on strategic leadership it’s something you mentioned before we got on the podcast that you are super passionate about obviously as you mentioned a few times now you’re getting your doctorate with within that realm so i do think it’s important that we kind of hear your thoughts i don’t know if you have specific areas that you want to start with this or even if you know i’m sure you’ve found a bunch of interesting information as you’ve gone through your doctorate with it as well so um however you kind of want to you know lead into this or whatever whatever whatever you want to go with as far as you know kind of setting this thing off but like what i mean there’s got to be something i mean we could even get down
to it where we talk about you know leadership within this particular industry and i know that that’s probably something that’s been you know bugging you or whatever just getting you fired up or whatever over the years and your experience in different ways so uh yeah man let’s let’s get it rolling let me hear some of your thoughts and i’ll just try to piggyback and whatever whatever i can yeah so one of the things that i really like to follow and i’ve messed around and i’ve had the opportunity to look through you know countless different theories and all this type of stuff and you know some of it seems like okay this is a little bit useful but in athletics you know i found probably the biggest one actually printed this off um so this is one of the things that i’ve used very successfully with our athletes um so i first implemented this with our football program
basically how do we create change and that was one thing i think people struggle with they they know they want change but they don’t know how to create change and so i found this uh in one of my classes i since i found it i had to read and i had a research know all this stuff um there’s a really simple book by john cotter he’s like a double doctorate from harvard or something crazy and he institutes all these leadership changes that like massive companies you know you’re talking about fortune 500 like billion dollar companies and guys turning around companies left and right but he has this really simple template that works for athletic teams athletic departments universities small scale big scale it’s really simple and i’m a huge fan of this so i first implemented with our football team um right when i started basically my doctors one of the first classes i had
was i got exposed to this i was like this might work like yeah let’s try to figure out how we can implement this with our team well we put this together and we had uh the first year i was here we went one and ten and bad bad stuff um then we turned around the next year and we went 9-3 we were actually it was the fourth biggest turnaround in ncaa division two history so there’s something pretty cool there going on um and when it really comes down to i’m pretty fortunate here my head coach playing football coach lets me pretty well take care of all the leadership because he knows that’s what i’m just obsessed with and so i actually start i i use connor’s eight methods for for starting to restructure our team and it was very very slow and i’m like goddess is catching on like is this working is this working and then all of a sudden it just like clicked and it really clicked the football camp
of where our team wants to be and you watch it was just noticeably different all of a sudden one day you just saw it right we’re going in and we’re two weeks in without a bad practice like three weeks no bad practices four weeks we’re going into our first game without a bad practice that never happened to them through four weeks of camp you know all that stuff and then we turned around and you know we knocked off two top five teams we lost a couple games we should have too so that’s our three losses were all you know we had one one team in there was a top three in conference and some middle pack games but that still gives us room to improve you know i i don’t think you’re going to go from one to ten to 15-0 but this gives us a room and you know we’re currently in that situation the good the great mentality i haven’t had a good year now build on top of that
i actually restarted this whole year with the exact same process and number one is creating a sense of urgency you know how do you create a sense of urgency well it’s really easy when you’re one and ten we sucked one indent well you’re you can’t really get much worse except for oh 11. so the sense of urgency there is taken care of and now the sense of urgency right now you know i’ve shifted that to we’re probably going to be pre-season number one well everyone’s got involved now that’s the new sense of urgency is every team will bring their absolute best so we know that we know that we will be a top pre-season pick now that we’re no longer we’re no longer going to be looked at as an underdog we are potentially should be our number one or number two team in the conference every season and everyone’s gonna know that that’s our new sense of urgency plus a
few other things that you know i won’t go into full details of the second is building a guiding coalition and with that it’s it’s about getting a couple choice people to start pushing their initiatives you know and i i basically think about eight or ten leaders for our team and i start introducing things to one of them and start slowly introducing that to others and others third is forming a strategic vision you know how do we start putting something together you know and the one thing that people fail to understand is they sit there and we did this exercise we posted online but i i asked every single player to put one word up that describes a perfect and you know you get all these you get all these different answers what someone really looks for but then how do you start to move towards that you know and then the fourth one is basically enlisting your arm you’re
getting the rest of everyone else in that’s when you’re really going to expose the rest of the team everybody to our vision finally you start number five as you start removing barriers how do you get things out of the way that are causing us not to you know start finding the barriers that are stopping us from moving forward and that can be a lot of things that can go anywhere from money that can be staffed that can be players you know we got to start pulling the things away that are actually slowing us down yeah that’s a heavy one that’s probably right like that’s probably where most people would fall short if you were successful in the first four right like that’s you know like the first four are reasonable right like you said like you’re creating a sense of urgency right you you and obviously you said your sense of urgency changed from being somebody who was like
all right well our team hasn’t won a game or we’ve won one game or whatever the case is so let’s our sense of urgency is to win games right and then obviously a change to our sense of urgency is to protect what we’ve built right so obviously you guys have gotten to a point where your preseason number one so um and then obviously building a guiding coalition and forming a strategic vision all those things are you know if you have good leadership right like you said you can accidentally get to a point and then obviously getting people to buy in i’m assuming that’s what number four is sort of built around right like like sort of enlisting getting getting you know getting by and creating a sort of a philosophy that people can latch on to but yeah starting to remove those barriers like once you get that it’s like all right everybody’s rallied everybody’s ready to go
yeah like removing the barriers because like you said some of those barriers may be things that are controllable some of them may be uncontrollable right so like how you like navigate that but um yeah no that’s that’s awesome please continue and then uh after that it starts to get a little bit more difficult but generating short-term wins how do you sit there and quantify you know win you know like today we we did a uh we did 60 yard shuttles and we make every guy has to be perfect we give him the hands to touch with lines starts finishes everything has to be perfect and when we start seeing all that stuff you know max is going up we didn’t have one single restart today on any of our of our running which was we had a perfect running day you know it’s just first day we’ve had that that is a huge short-term win that our guy’s been trying for and you know we’ve got a
couple of new guys and also they can’t quite hit our standards and and everyone knows where our standards are but then we have one guy in this you know look you got 100 guys and you’re doing running and one guy misses everybody starts over and so we had our first full no mistake day running today and you can see the difference in guys all of a sudden like hey we were perfect today but next week we even have to be better you know and that was the whole thing finally the last two are sustained acceleration like how do you keep finishing out and then ultimately is institute the change and the funny thing about it is that it starts all over um you know you start with your next thing what’s your next problem attack when you start all over that you know the hardest one is actually finishing the change people get 99 percent of the way done and then they’ll just leave that one little thing you
know it’s like restoring the car like man it’s got great paint it’s got all this but i just don’t find that one damn tail light you know and then you just kind of give up on that well no you don’t finish every little detail everything and finish out one that’s what’s going to get you the ultimate and that’s the one that i think people really they see success but not ultimate success and they they stop right there and that’s that’s a huge one where especially athletics like oh man we just went and beat this team this team and this team you know but we kind of fell short here but we’re still really good well that’s what we’re doing we’re not going for really good really good is not good enough for where we are right now and i use that with our team we are insanely talented i’ve been working at division two majority of my career and this is part of the most talented
team i’ve ever seen if we go nine and three next year that’s a failure you know it’s a failure for what we’ve done with the way our coaches have recruiting uh recruited and i think we have the best recruiting staff in the nation if you ask me from where we went to my first year here going into my fourth year here um the talent we have i have never seen at division two and we’re insane we always pulled a four star left hacking at a division two school there are plenty there are plenty of division one kids uh division one schools have been killed for that kid right now you know yes we got a our offensive coordinator slash o-line coach is such an insane recruiter i have never seen i don’t know how some major issues whatever think about they shouldn’t say that on here so there’s it i don’t know it’s still so good right he has details on everyone we got a meeting no joke and he goes
you know i talked to his junior high coach and he was late one practice one time so i’m like i think we can forgive six years ago uh but he knows every detail about these kids but that’s the biggest thing going through that is as you get those eight things done and then you tackle the next problem we restart all the way over but the good thing about this is you tackle multiple problems at once you might start one problem here and you might get through enlisting a volunteer army or whatever and then you start your next and you start getting after it you know it’s not uh you’re not done when you start you just move on the next problem you keep going with that and ultimately you never are done trying to create change you know everybody sits there and they they think i don’t know we’ll just use world westerns or state you know yeah they go 15-0 that’s great but you
think they don’t care about 15-0 next year like congrats you won you had a great year or whatever we’ll do everyone in that i didn’t even know last year but for any school division doesn’t matter but are you done after that no you just got to start back over it’s the same thing no matter what challenge you’re going after you start after the next one and often you don’t even finish that one before you start after the next one you still got to finish the other one so and i think as a strength coach we see that all the time it’s like i only work with one team i’m tackling the problems of softball and baseball and tennis and golf and football this monumental problem so we’re constantly trying to institute change now that being said i run three basic teams here you know i run right now i run football basketball and baseball and i try to implement this heavily it works best with men’s
basketball and football and both those two teams are setting record right now as far as performance and uh callus conference record’s non-stop so i think it’s starting to work this is something that i think it’s tried and true of course john connor is 20 billion times smarter than probably 20 billion times richer too no you’re a strength coach what do you mean you’re not rich well if you look at the back wall you know all my money goes into those i don’t heard there’s a lift back there so yeah i was going to say i was like this looks like an olympic weightlifting shoe ad i have almost every single pair almost ever made nice yeah i’d be lying if i said i didn’t check out your instagrams here before we did this podcast you uh you’re into the olympic list it looks like just a little bit i sprayed my wrist really bad the other day and i’m fighting through that just
spotting a girl and i freaking slammed the bar up in and something didn’t do right in there and oh i actually thought it was broke for sure i wouldn’t got an x-ray this it wasn’t so i still have snatching i think i snatched like 275 today or something like that but uh oh yeah just 275. huh it’s not quite moving away that was funny i was talking to my brother about it before i was like before i hopped on the podcast i was like yeah i was like um i was like i was checking on this dude’s instagram last night i was like i’m not gonna lie like dude can lift like he can move some weight you know and my brother is like you think he would care about you know my little brother he’s like the youngest bro i’m the oldest of five boys and he’s the youngest one and we we live together today he eat a pr and you know i’m not gonna put it out there or whatever it was it
was a good you know getting some he’s getting some weight on his back you know i mean and i was like he was like do you think he would care about my pr and i’m like honestly bro judging by the amount of weight this dude’s moving i don’t really think he would care that much i was like but but i’ll let him know that you pr if that’s something that you already saw here’s me leave me letting you know you know the the craziest thing for me was it took me you know i got here the last was that no one could ever beat my you know my clean squat bench toe couldn’t even come close we got here and i’m like all right you know we’ll see and i i had a our left tackle benched 500 this year i can’t 500 and then we had like i had like six guys out squatting and i’m just like i haven’t beat my clean yet but like we had we brought in a couple freshmen that are seven like legit
parallel or below squats at 700 plus i mean like we have some houses here i told you we’re recruiting the recruiting areas we just we brought kids in you know and we got a kid he came in he was like a 625 squatter and then as freshman i grind him you know i got him pretty hard but like this kid’s special like he goes 655 and 675 easy i’m like i can’t do that there there are limitations when you become a married man with kids getting your doctorate you know there’s only oh i’m five seven two twenty and i can’t gain much more weight than that ever that’s a stretch to get there and he’s not fat kid squatting and yeah he’s just got that body weight in size and he’s about this wide i can put my hands away wire in the camera because he’s wider than i can reach in this camera yeah no it’s been that’s something that they you know i sit there and i was like man i just got a smoke like four guys
today on squats the first time i got beat like man that’s you though that’s you you did that like you also do that i’m like all right i’ll take that you know yeah passing the torch passing the charge somebody’s got to do it right that’s uh that’s awesome well um yes i i do have some questions though obviously about some of the uh items that we listed out and just so the listeners know um obviously your friend the guy’s name john john connor john cotter cotter is that c-o-d-e-r it’s actually just john like normal k-o-t-t-e-r and the book is leading change is the one i’ve written that’s fine okay um that’s awesome so yeah i mean if we could just kind of get like work our way through some of these um and then we can kind of like take this out wherever you want it to go obviously depending on where the conversation goes but i do think that i do have some questions because
at some point like you said every single year you need to start over whether you had success with these things or not right so i guess my first question would be which one of these was the one that you felt the most challenged with and why and then kind of what i i guess my my thoughts on this too and i tend to do this sometimes when i like load up a double question but um i guess like i’m trying to at least like when i when i first started interning right i would i remember i went up to the director i was at quinnipiac university over here in connecticut and i was like i’m just feeling like one of these days i’m like man i don’t get it like what are we what are we doing here exactly like what are we doing like phenomenal program great culture great environment the kids are great staff do what i’m working for is awesome but i’m like what are we actually doing here like what you
know what i mean like this is kind of like the way that i think at times and i was like why why are we like there has to be something more than like we train athletes we get them to try to be more resilient in the field on the field in the court ice whatever they win some championships they get some notoriety and feel what it’s like to feel success in their life and failures and overcome challenges and then they move on to maybe playing at the pro level but most likely not right just kind of going on and starting a career and the cycle just continues and i’m like there has to be like something deeper and i can’t say for sure that i have the answer to that um but i do think that looking specifically at like why something is created versus being amazed with what has been created is a really interesting way to go about things and at least at least for me
someone who like needs that like mental stimulation to like understand exactly the deeper mechanisms that are at work here i would imagine you’re probably someone who appreciates that as well given what you’re getting your doctorate in um yeah like what like you know what i mean like does that play a that’s got to play a part in starting over right there has to be something all right well now guys we want to start over because we need to get to 15-0 again and it’s like well that’s fine like we win 15 games but like if we just keep winning 15 games like like i would imagine it’s probably more so long ones like how are we winning these 15 games what exactly are we trying to produce because like these let’s be honest like these like the 15 wins that you guys have like at least this is the way i’ve used sport now it’s like it’s become so it’s so cyclical and obviously it takes place
every year that most people don’t even remember the stuff that happens outside of these like really like insane moments right and like the college and professional levels or whatever but most of the time you kind of forget all of the little minutia that takes place in the in the meantime so there’s got to be some sort of deeper meaning behind what we’re doing here right so yeah i’m not even sure like where the question is in that but i’m sure you’ve you know i mean i’ll let you kind of take it from there well i think so one thing that my entire staff did so again there’s i’ve got basically two full-time people with being a ga and then all my interns so we all we all did uh we looked at different philosophies mission statements bishops and stuff like that and the reason why is because i want to show everyone what people are about what how do you get your point across and
actually the book you know john connor uh changing shooting leading change there’s uh there’s some talk about you know vision statements and stuff like that in it and so i went over our stuff our vision saving our philosophy overall and as we go through that there’s two really big points um for me and the number one is the idea of servant leadership you know we’re going to not just sit there and demand a demand demand but we’re going to take care of people you know and that’s it i don’t care if you’re talking about at being a ceo at a fortune 500 or if you’re talking about being a sports performance director a football coach athletic director doesn’t matter if you learn to take care of people they’re not going to leave hey they’re going to give you tremendous effort and they’re going to be happy people are going to be happy and that’s one thing you know i really implemented that’s
actually my number one that’s my number one rule as my number one point my philosophy is you know we will practice certain leadership and that’s a huge thing that i i’ve learned a lot more recently that like my athletes and my coaches were absolutely powerful right now because i’m gonna take care of them and i’ve done anything i can to help make their life easier you know i try to have every solution possible now that doesn’t mean that i know it just means i know someone who does and when they understand that they they really started to move in a different direction like there there isn’t uh well i’ll be honest last school i was at it there was just uh man coach fears it’s tough like he’s hard to work your butt off all that kind of stuff and i think hopefully if i were to say the difference here is i i really hope that they would say who really cares if he really cares
does this guy care if i left tomorrow like what would my athletes say would they be like we can’t do this without that type of stuff what would my administration say they’d be like cool let’s find the next guy or would it be like how are we going to replace this guy he would ever think he took care of everyone who knew everything how to do all this stuff uh it just seemed like he was relentless that’s that’s the that’s the edge and then the other thing is it’s creating leaders you know like we that that’s the very last actual point of my whole philosophy number one is sort of leadership ironically the very last one is creating leaders you know how do we create leaders and why is that so important because football stops basketball stocks and stocks at some point you know and if you can sit there and understand that creating a leader is a lifelong thing and understanding
i can teach my leadership methods very quick to athletes i can teach a lot of leaders not everyone’s meant to be one of one of my favorite actual leadership theories of followership like you got to follow us too that’s fine well i’ve got you know i’ve got one of my staff members right now who is probably the best follower i’ve ever seen in my life he’s one of the most amazing head assistant jokes somewhere but he’s going to take a long time a head coach but as and he’d be a first line guy take this guy’s assistant you want this guy but it’s going to take a long ideas how to time and everything like that that dude can regurgitate every single point of my philosophy every part of my coaching use everything to a t i verbatim but he’s not really a leader he’s not gonna come with his own ideas yet he’s not gonna understand how to take this team that has this problem and fix it that way um
i think those are the two points yeah well probably i mean for that kid in particular obviously you know yeah we need good leaders but good leaders are probably good followers at some point like you said right you need good followers you need something like we need to know who to follow right like that’s the idea if someone’s leading us i mean someone’s got to be someone’s got to be following somebody right and i could identify who those good leaders are and you know i think for that kid like you said at some point like he’s gonna get to a point where he has his own voice and he has his own philosophies and all that kind of stuff but he’s lucky to have you obviously because you come from a situation where like you said like you thought there was you know you were kind of like all right here’s one way that we’re gonna go about doing all these things right and you’re
able to you’re probably able to regurgitate all those things as well until you you know came across that individual who was like hey do your own thinking almost assume that you’ve been given zero instruction just like what is it that you think right now and how would you go about executing a b and c and that you know even uh one of the things about followership is like every leader pretty well has to follow something like i have to follow my ap might be as follow president our president still has reported you know the russo board and so on so forth like they’re you really never completely you always have to follow right might be one person yeah yeah it’s it’s good stuff i i i do think that there is you know something to be said about you know taking taking athletes taking other people like you know providing pro because you’re essentially providing an
experience for these guys and i think i said this in a previous podcast as well where i was kind of talking about like the roles and the responsibilities of a university right and the roles and responsibilities of australian conditioning coach like we want to get you in a position where you have to provide an experience for the student athlete and if that extended if that student athlete is experiencing something along the lines of like hey um we’re overcoming all different types of barriers and that’s kind of what i thought about here when i’m looking at like start removing barriers i’m in the list of barriers that you could potentially come across when you’re trying i mean it they can give so many different avenues right it’s not even just talking about like financial barriers or you know maybe it’s you know barriers when it comes to your resources
or barriers when it comes to your talent areas when it comes to you know skill um could be it could be barriers when it comes to how you know the communication is taking place how your athletes are perceiving some of the coaches that are leading them the dynamic and complex relationship that they probably have with their coaches and with you um with other other teammates right like especially in the squad of football players when you’re talking about having like over 150 people in the program obviously anywhere from like 80 to 100 players on the team um so what were like those you know specific i mean you don’t have to get too specific what were some of the barriers that you were like yeah here’s a barrier that most people would assume would be a barrier i like maybe your ads like hey listen like uh we can we can do this and we can’t do that whatever but
there’s got to be some barriers in there that go way beyond just you know the the typical norms right uh so yeah yeah there’s some interesting ones and i think at division two those barriers get a little bit different uh financial resources change now i’m gonna tell you when i first got here uh a couple big barriers unfortunately we had a couple we had a couple just a couple position groups i’m not gonna say anything um probably the dbs right it’s always it’s always the dbs i i wish you know it always starts up front you know what i mean yeah but uh we were just lacking in a few spots and killed us i mean one of the barriers we had was just not having enough talent in certain areas uh facilities you know i came here i had a 22 400 square foot room with 16 racks and no dumbbells nice and 385 pounds of weight raccoon wow yeah that was that was a really big
barrier to start with you couldn’t even lift in there no oh and the floor was sloped downhill the whole way nice um i’m still convinced when i do my olympic lifts my left foot slides back about three inches on my right doesn’t move and i’m still convinced this is that damn floor and i’m going and it just i leave a little my left every time and yeah anyways i’m just now horrible facilities when i got here um and then we had a little bit of we changed presidents and it kind of pulled everything back to the budget i was supposed to be in that room for six months i ended up being that room for 19 months and i’m not gonna lie to you if i would have been told that leave that room for 19 months i may not have taken the job now looking back of course i’m happy because my facility’s amazing i have i i in my opinion i put together the best division 2 staff um that money to mine
i have killer coaches i have killer interns you know i’ve got more help than i could ever need and then i have a boss that is just pushing and pushing you know he’s already promised another position
you know he puts that back a lot on the roof and he also i mean we’re also now in the process of putting together what should be the best uh nutrition recovery room we’re gonna say in division two as well that was one thing we’ve got support that’s some barriers that would not you know those were we had no almost no nutrition support we had no weight room and i’m over here trying to it’s like here’s a rock and a stick build a football team with this you know and it’s like we’ve got barbells and barbells and we can’t even lift safely because these racks are spaced at a foot and a half apart like if the guy’s loading plates he can get just drilled by another bar yeah and then i think the the other barriers is a culture culture is probably one of the biggest barriers of we came in and and i’m not not trying to trash the other coaches over here they were very
successful as a matter of fact one of them uh our d coordinator i think is still the dolphins and he’s phenomenal he’s a phenomenal coach but we just coached different from our career coaching staff you know they were a very coach-led program we’re trying to create a very player-led program and that’s one of the things i heard is really bad the first season having some lacking talent but then we kept going the players kept looking for leadership and they’re like who’s going to lead who’s going like you you believe and so i’m trying to teach this and i’m trying to push it i’m trying to teach it more and that was actually what really moved me towards actually doing my doctor’s strategic leadership instead of actually doing a so i was considering either the edd or phd in educational leadership or something around that field and then i found that strategic leadership it’s
really just kind of funny one of the i guess counselors or whoever it is um called me up from liberty university which is not doing my doctorate and they’re like you know with what you’re telling me it sounds like you might be more interested in this doctor’s strategic leadership all right tell me more give me more info on it and so i read it i’m like wow this is exactly what i want this sounds so much better in educational leadership where it’s it’s not so you know a doctor of strategic leadership is a practitioner’s degree it’s not it’s considered more you know it’s more something like doing a doctorate of physical therapy it isn’t legit like puts you in the situation figure out how to fix this now here’s the theoretical side no it’s the theoretical side of it now here’s how you apply it and actually use it and that was the thing that blew my mind the most of actually the doctor
that i’ve been doing was how do you how do you actually implement all this stuff but to swim back the question was you know that i think the biggest one was our facilities it seemed like because we were putting all of our money into the new facility funding was just like i’m asking for stuff but it’s like you’ll get it you’ll get it and then i’m like okay well i’ve got a almost two million dollar facility going up i almost feel bad for asking about more right so and then honestly a huge barrier was i was the first ever director of sports performance here so i i opened up this program and people didn’t understand what it was people are like weight room guy wait i’m like no no no no first of all don’t call me a strength coach you know i’m a strength coach i’m a sports performance coach against that’s nothing in strength coaches it’s just i think do i wear sixty thousand hats
you know i’m right i’m going into you know our admin meetings and football meetings meeting with our athletic trainers and i’m doing sports psychology and i’m going to sports nutrition as best i can at least you know and you know i’m not strengthening sports performance i have to pretty well take care of everything but yeah i think that’s the god and there’s so many other barriers i can sit back and look at but it’s just i think your culture was just that one that a lot of people don’t see was we went from this culture to almost a polar opposite shift and then obviously facilities when i first got here i don’t know it was just like like i said it was trying to like make a football team with a stone and a piece of string that was strong probably should have brought dan john down he would have done it just fine but yeah he would have figured it out right that that was crazy and i could
from players you know even even a few coaches that we got rid of were barriers and you know i and if i had to be honest there’s probably still some very facts are still dozens of barriers here that we haven’t broke down sure yeah right like those barriers don’t ever go away right but it’s more so like the systems that you have in place to deal with them to mitigate them to maybe even potentially at some point you know get rid of them and i think i think it’s you know going back to your your point before this is one thing that like i tried to focus on like in my experience working in football was like you know i was part of a you know very unsuccessful program specific to the scoreboard and like what was on paper you know obviously as far as like records go um and i tried to do some like serious reflecting on it but i think what i really came to is like it’s not as if like the actual
and of course there were there were coaches on staff and players on staff maybe not meet the standard of what you need for like a division one fbs program or whatever the case is but like it wasn’t more so that like like in my mind i always believe them probably like you do like you always believe that like the people that you’re working with outside of like like you said like maybe there’s a few barriers but for the most part you’re like hey listen i’m a leader i’m a type a guy i’m going to make it work with whoever like i’m not going to sit here and be like i need to i need to get him out of there because i need to get this i need to get my it’s like no this is what i got is what i got obviously like a division two it’s not like you get to like bring in or do whatever it is that you want to do like there are certain restrictions or certain limitations so you’re saying
yourself i need to make it work with the people that i have here i’m going to create an environment and i’m going to get people to buy in and obviously that means being super versatile with your personalities the way you obviously are connecting with all these individuals right like that type of leadership that that to me is true leadership right like and i think jacques willing talks about like the uncomfortableness of uh of saying you know leadership is essentially manipulation but it is in some way shape or form if you are just one person the whole time right so and we can get into that but i think going back to what you said about like specific coaches that ended up going on and being successful in other places it’s again it’s i looked at it as the group that was assembled to do a specific task did not get it done it’s not to say that one area or like these coaches are not
successful coaches or like we are not we were not successful strain coaches or whatever the case would be but the people who were assembled in this group to try to execute a specific task and to try to be successful in that and set yourself up with specific systems to help understand failures to filter failures to try to provide solutions and things of that effect those things did not happen right and that’s usually what will lead to a downhill spiral of all of these things like when you when you first talked about like the program that you walked into so um you know i think i think really getting back to that it’s like like how what what are some of the skills that you feel like you’ve developed over the years of trying to reach various types of people like say you’re probably dealing with a zillion different people like you said you wear many hats you’re in different
meetings right like how did you get it to where it’s like all right i can’t just decide that uh you know like in most professions you don’t just get to like walk into a new office and be like all right um yeah one two three i don’t like them they gotta go i mean like in football individual football obviously they create their own rules it works that way right but in most places in most professions that are respectable right like you have to make it work with the people who have been there right while you’re slowly kind of like merging and grab it gravitating and bringing some of your own you know people in i guess you could say so your thoughts on that i’d love to hear so i’ve got two different methods for that but one is uh probably the easiest one i’ve ever done and i love doing this with coaches because this is you’ll almost warn the death at one point but then you’ll get your point
across um i i write and i make all my level two injuries by the way so i have a level one internship where we do um we do the x’s nose we learn max percentages different types of variations of workouts push pulls you know different types of stuff and then my level two is a nothing but backwards design course for 12 weeks basically so we go through and i make and i make them all do it together just like i would if a coach do it we do a full backwards design thinking about starting with the sport physicians injury prevention performance everything i make every single thing go up on the board and i’ll be like miss this miss this miss this by the time you are done you have your entire program on the board for what you’re going to do with your athletes progressions percentages everything all your basic movements and everything you want and it’s all the way down to you have 6 000 bubbles with
everything right here okay i have a 4×8 board over right there in my office and it will not fit on it okay and we’ll get we’ll have paper and everything all over the place and i make them do it with their full group of all my level two interns and so i make them agree and this is exactly what i do with coaches when they try to sit there and and well why why do we do that look well i will sit down and i’ll do this whole thing with them and it’s going to take a minimum of an hour but you know a lot of coaches believe that you know this is what we want and so we’ll go over everything i will sit down and we’ll sit there and we’ll talk about how to make our athletes explosive and we’ll agree on what makes them explosive and we’ll talk about what makes an injury you know injury-free hamstrings all right this is softball so we have shoulder issues how do we keep the
shoulders healthy what about the elbows okay how to do that you got wrist issues okay well lower back or is that okay let’s fix this simple you know by the time we’re done like i said six thousand little bubbles with everything now coaches never care about burialization they don’t know what they don’t have but you start talking about that like oh you do your thing okay cool cool i’ll do that hard well what about this oh you know you picked that too okay so i did this for an hour and a half at the coach one time and uh he was a track coach many years ago the first shut that down coach i’ve used this idea i use backwards design for quite a while it’s the whole idea of you’re going to make everything based off the sport and break it all down and by the end of that entire hour and a half conversation the only thing i budged on was he had to have stiff legging deadlifts in there
the old school you know uh bigger faster stronger stand on a box and i’m like okay now that’s got to put a lot of stress on the back right he’s like well yeah yeah yeah i understand that i’m like okay so we got to do a light right yeah i can agree with that what about 20 clues well that sounds good which means the barber for example and so that i gave up two sets of ten straight leg deadlifts stiff leg deadlift whatever i call with a bar that’s it it’s not terrible okay i didn’t have you know um three minutes of my entire week was given up after that and by the time we were done he thought he wrote that whole program yeah no doubt so it’s it’s in a sense man i wrote this great program yeah it’s his idea yeah we just we came to agreement and yeah it took a little bit of time and then we produced one of them you know we see a very successful team right here as well
so it was a win-win like yeah it cost me an hour and a half of my life but hey that coach was never on my back again we had a great relationship after that as a matter of fact uh he helped me get a raise not long after that sorry not you know not my boss at the time he went up and said do you realize how many hours this guy’s putting in am i going to raise that so that’s a great deal you know one thing that i really try to be i i really try to be well-rounded with a lot of stuff you know i try to be able to hold conversations just about everyone um about anything you know i’m i do a ton of weird stuff like i do a lot of woodworking you know i like cars i just about everything so i yeah you can talk to someone more like more than just work like they’ll start to really they care about you as a person it’s a whole lot harder yeah you know when you’re sitting there and
you can tell you know hey how’s your kid doing you know uh dad doing all right all that type of stuff hey i know your dad was up there last week would you guys do but get away from work you know and that’s with athletes too uh like i told you i’m in such a good situation right now you know it’s nothing for me to have eight interns that all know exactly what i wanted to have three full-time coaches working with football or something like that you know or you know six or eight people on the floor at one time with 16 racks you’ve got a great facility but i can actually go around and yeah i’ll make my corrections i’ll see something hey let’s get this fixed do it this way but i can actually talk to people that gives me one of those things you know like i’ll find out who is this kid about it is his mom really important to him you know did he grow up with a dad
without a dad did he have this issue or anything like that and then you can start to play out that kid so much more and you learn who they are and really learn who they are that’s really tugging the heart strings you know like you find out you know i got a kid right now and would your dad be practicing and he’s just like steps back a little bit like figure out what tugs out of it makes the change yeah when you figure out exactly who they are you know who was that really big role model you know i had a athlete years ago that uh transferred him from the zoo and i asked him i said who’s the biggest role model you’ve ever had in your life without it like without a hesitation and so this kid just works his freaking
you mean a lot to this kid if he hasn’t contacted me please reach out to him or i’m having reach out to people i’m going to connect you guys again whatever and then the end of the pattern of actually hiring his ga uh defender but that was a huge thing that was a huge thing for me where this kid came from and i became he had a really rough time growing up and pat ivy was you know pat either it’s like probably you know that i do biggest father role models
little things like that you start to realize how to kind of tug at kids and push that direction that’s to me that’s really really successful yeah yeah that’s uh that kind of that makes sense that kind of answers some of the questions that i had before too right getting back to like what what exactly is this whole thing that we’re doing here right what are we trying to provide i think going back to what you said before too about you know developing the relationship with the coaches essentially i know you said like it took an hour and a half of your time you’re meeting with these coaches or whatever whatever the case is to personally like i think there’s a ton of value in having it’s not to say that the meetings have to be a certain amount of time but just like having face-to-face meetings where there’s actually an agenda set up and things are actually getting accomplished
right so i think yeah like everybody has meetings right and everybody meets but like what is like the construct of the meeting how is it set up so that certain people are saying certain things certain people have a voice but there’s like a sort of a limitation to like making sure that like you know things are said in a you know short concise clear and respectable manner and obviously there’s good quality like you know just constructive thought being put out there right so what you were doing essentially is by trying to reach the coach like you’re setting up a system of education like that’s probably the best way to reach any coach right let’s be like i’m gonna set i’m gonna set myself up where i’m gonna educate everybody i work with as much as possible what’s going on here so that way when there are questions that come down or there are failures that we
come across which inevitably there will be you’re going to have some sort of system that you guys can filter through it’s like okay well this is you know you like you said you and the football coach decided on what develops power how will you develop power within your athletes how do they how do you make them more explosive right give them a different frame of reference even different perspective whether they want to shift it off on you or not fine whatever the case is right but at least there’s an understanding of how we’re going to go about developing this quality right so um i think to kind of wrap that up right that you know that the answer to that my particular question was create a system where you’re educating every single person in the building on what it is that you do and then obviously in turn hear their thoughts as well allow them to have the input right reach them and
then you know as you said when it trickles down into some of the athletes you’re talking about figuring out the specific things that make them tick and the things that they obviously care most about in their life which could take two to three years for a lot of athletes depending on you know their experiences and and their you know willingness to be vulnerable which is very tough for uh you know 17 to 18 year old kid obviously coming in trying to figure out a way to take on the challenges of you know emotional stress and social stress of college um while also trying to understand a playbook and listening to about 15 different you know leaders right who are like telling them what you need to do and how you need to do it and trust them and all that kind of stuff so um yeah now this this honestly awesome answers and i really appreciate your thoughts on all this stuff i guess i i i
know you know i want to wrap up here soon because i know i want to let you go but i do have one more question um specifically when it comes around when it comes to creating these like small wins right you talked about like creating these setting yourself up where it’s like okay i’m gonna have it so um you know in the the example you gave was a physical example right where you’re running 60 yard shuttles and you want to make sure that everybody’s turning in the right direction everybody’s touching the line or whatever the case whatever constraints you put on the exercise right um what would you say and i have an idea but i do want to ask what would you say to people who are you know out there criticizing um coaches who do spend time on this like you know and what they would consider wasting time on oh diddy did you guys touch lawn did everybody start at the right time or
not did we you know clap at the same time whatever the case is none of those two are mutually exclusive but obviously you have some thoughts on how this has provided some success for you and your teams by creating small victories right for you guys to build upon um so what would you say to people out there who are critical of that saying that this doesn’t have any transfer to whether or not they would be successful in their sport or in other endeavors of their life um what what are your thoughts on that i think you go back and you just look at what are we trying to achieve as a team we’re trying to trade you all right we’re trying to be all on the same page you know i have a i have a really simple rule here uh i and i’ve said this since i started you know the one thing that when i started i said no matter what and i’ve said this since i ever started feel free to ask questions ask why
always ask me you know ask why too often i’m okay with that i’ll i will i might give you a five word answer but i’m gonna have a reason if i can’t tell you why we do it you have to do it you know and that started out and kids will ask why why why why do we do this why well three years in like my words goldmine no one asked me why and i still say it all the time feel free to ask me questions but it’s just now it’s it says do it do it and i didn’t get that way by being malicious i didn’t do that with my packing people he just simply showed that discipline will create results and i some people let certain things slide and you know i’ll never forget that that picture of the this is the distance to winning and losing no kidding and to me it it we preached small details small details small details small details okay i said non-stop i say every single week the little details is what
we’re winning these games and that is that’s the difference and i don’t care every good team lifts every good team practices every good team eats their meals every good team does their stretches everything it’s the little things and that line is a little thing it might be an inch but that might be what separates us you know and at the other day talking about wins like coach i only bought my max up like 10 pounds how do you know that 10 pounds going to work you don’t know that you don’t know that only 10 pounds may be all it takes coach i only did this much better that may be all it takes and you never know that five extra pounds that tenth of a second faster than 100 of a second faster that one inch further is going to be the difference in the wind loss and the old saying and it’s a little bit cliche but football is a game of inches and milliseconds absolutely though it is you know if
you sit there and you got a couple inches every single run all of a sudden that third one is all in the third one and all those things to me add up and i i will always preach little things because everybody doesn’t do things the little things add up to be bigger than the big things i don’t care anymore because we all practice how do we practice okay we all squat almost guaranteed almost every single football player how do you squat are we doing it right are we in good positions does it look athletic or does it look like my feet are six feet apart on the power lifter and i’m gonna claim that even though i didn’t close it’s squatting in parallel well those things matter but the position’s bad or everything you know i say this all the time no matter what we do all we really do is strength coaches we reinforce if i make a guy squat more weight and become a better basketball player
what am i doing what am i doing oh if i make a guy swap my weight but he’s gonna become more injured probably actually comes more than your problem to lessen your phone i am doing a terrible job you know and i probably need to move on in my career but it’s all those little things you know the way we look at things and i say this all the time to recruit it’s like i don’t have a magic recipe okay i i really don’t i don’t have a magic recipe but i will make sure you i’ll make sure you’re putting it on weight room is gone safely correctly you know we’re in a squat in the right positions and i don’t think there’s a whole lot of debate what a good spot looks like there’s a little bit of tears and yeah you might be a little bit more knees over toes you might be a little boy it might be a little bit wider based well i think there’s a couple there’s more one way to do it but you know in general
it doesn’t are you going to let those things slide you know and that that’s just such a small little example of the millions of things because your head through on a military press you know where’s your hips out i’m clean and you know my obsession with bliss i i wouldn’t pick those till the cows come home um but i will just absolutely like can you take care of these little things and little things and little things end up being while we have four weeks of straight good practices because we’ve parked on those little things and all of a sudden our coach is just sitting there and he’s like everything look good today where do we even go from here like you start challenging the coaches to figure out how to even make the players better again we weren’t perfect no one’s ever going to go but how do we keep building on top of that those small little victims can do it you
know and you know the one thing that you know i want to mention real quick you know we do a three-tier approach and we this is one of the big things that we got when you look at cotter you know you know a sense of urgency we put all of our athletes based off strength numbers and explosive numbers the three different categories for our groups this semester the first time i’ve been able to do this it’s something i want to do forever we put them in you know the way we run things we have a great group which is kind of our third string freshman type group we have blue which is our second string we have gold which is our starters and we broke everyone down not based off their starters but their straight numbers and explosive numbers and stuff like that and we make everything super objective so like this is where you need to be this is what you have this is your you know and we break them
down and put in different groups based on that and also now i’ve got i told you i was late to this i came in 20 minutes late to this because i’ve got 20 god coach what do i need to get into this what do i need to do
and that again that seems like it’s a little thing add 20 pounds to your squad it’s not a monumental thing but at the end of the day it might be all it takes little things might be ridiculous okay i’m gonna tell you right now i i say this non-stop every single team i work with we’re gonna win or lose a baseball game by long run we’re going to win or lose a football game by one possession we are going to lose or win a basketball game by one two three points which is obviously one shot one possession game you can make that in 1.8 seconds 2.2 seconds the little things the little things will add up to do you win by one you lose do you win by two you lose by two and that’s when people start criticizing everything you never know when that one little thing will be particularly lost and i hate to say it but our three losses were by combined i think of it was 11 points yeah so
those little things caught up to us on the backside we didn’t take care of my favorites had a great year but our football program lost three games by i believe it was a combined eleven things yeah so right um yeah so i mean i think i think that’s a perfect way to end this obviously i couldn’t have said it better myself um i i do think it’s it’s worth noting obviously the people you know at southeastern oklahoma state are extremely lucky to have you um i think you know just in the short time that i’ve obviously gotten to know you you take a deep interest in trying to develop your interns develop your coaches create relationships with the sport coaches and the other administrators and athletic trainers that you work with you care about educating them you care deeply about the players and obviously providing an experience to them that they won’t be able to forget that goes far beyond
obviously the the 15 wins that you guys desire i think you have a serious intent behind how you approach the craft of training conditioning the craft of being an educator a teacher and obviously somebody who’s trying to pursue their doctorate as a leader you know so um you can just hear in your voice so this this has been super enjoyable i really appreciate the fact that you did this but you know no no doubt you know and i don’t say this about everybody but they they really are lucky to have you there and i do think you are in a really great situation there it seems like you’re having a lot of fun um it seems like you’re really enjoying yourself and you guys are obviously gonna set yourself up for success so um you know yeah like that we’ll wrap up there if you got you know uh social media uh any anything that you want people like anywhere people can contact you or
anything that you want people to know about as far as resources that you find valuable that can kind of help shape or any sort of last insights that you want to put out there um the floor is yours and then we’ll we’ll wrap up yeah you reach out to me on instagram at coach spears it’s pretty simple uh as far as resources i mean there are so many good books out there you know for new guys and go read the g3 ceo strength coach go read some of the more simple stuff like try basic it’s not that different go retry things go read great for a few years on super training that world i’m still highlighting in that one i don’t think i’ve ever you know it’s it’s sitting over there collecting dust i should probably get back into that thing i’m pretty sure just the whole book’s highlighted i’ve got to highlight six different colors i highlight different things but it’s all highlighted so yeah
that’s how it was a lot of james smith’s work you know gdc and applied spring like like people borrow the books from them like dude what it would have been easier for you to just highlight the things that you didn’t think were valuable as opposed to just highlighting the whole page but no i mean be well-rounded i mean especially you know unless you’re at some major major league division one like be good at a lot of things you know unless you’re just running you know linear sprint mechanics at a major vision one like you’re going to be good at a lot of things understand leadership understands nutrition i didn’t get too stuck on certain things you know i’m obviously leadership obsessed but i started out i think i just kind of i find my little niche i really enjoy something for six months and i try to move on to next thing um leadership’s been the one that’s really stuck with
romney’s reasons um but find out find something and really dive in and get really good at it and then find your next thing you know get really good at that and keep moving around you’re never gonna be great at everything that’s one thing that’s pretty obvious but that’s anything you’re never even supposed to get everything you can’t there’s just too many things but when it comes to straight condition there’s a ton too like are you gonna be a bbt guy huge so i probably read every single piece of literature ever written by anyone you can imagine about people who have such an obsession with it because i’ve seen so much carrier carry over with it but i also go coach when you’re sprinting pretty well too you know but i stole that info from someone else just like i swallowed a people and stuff you know uh biometrics you know all that type of stuff talking about the
stretch short and side burning like that understand a little bit of everything you know you go through i’ll never forget like taking my cscs leave my sccc i’m like i’ll never use this stuff this stuff is important now i’m looking back like holy crap this stuff’s really important like i forgot all this stuff and i knew this at one point and now i’m not even using it i’m looking back like and now i’m looking at you know short biometrics fast biometric plus a small biometrics how are we going to use these and how okay now i’ve got two types of plyometrics i mean how do i start using those okay now i’ve got my dvd back spot so i got a regular back squats i don’t want to measure okay hold on okay well maybe partials aren’t good maybe there’s time for math squats okay well i’m not gonna figure it all out i like peak how to do this
just read a little bit of everything that’s jake anderson’s quote you know don’t read everything you believe don’t leave everything you read but read a lot of different stuff but i’m looking at a lot of different stuff you get to know a lot of different stuff that’s what’s going to make sure at least the look and thing can be a little bit different like todd rice stop doing whatever else possible do what makes sense designing your programs what makes sense to understand force development understand position stop doing whatever else is doing just because well it’s put in that is the law now we’ve laid it down zach said we appreciate that um again we appreciate your time this was awesome um i’ll i’ll get with you once once we finish up here but uh yeah thank you again for for joining us and uh yeah we’ll uh for everybody listening we’ll see you guys next time
