| EliteFTS

When I was the Director of Education at Elitefts, I had the opportunity to met with and assist many coaches in the industry. I guess it was a combination of me being at the D3 level for so long but I had a reputation of starting a program from scratch. I did my best to run a DI program with D3 resources. I made a ton of mistakes but I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to pass those learning experiences to other coaches. I wrote a few articles previous to this one directed at those small school strength coaches:

So, most of the conversations I have had with coaches helped my bullet-point some ideas for the small college weight room. These issues are unique to the small college setting and high school settings. There may be no right answer to solve these but hopefully, this will provide a blueprint for coaches. I separated this into 2 challenges and 5 fallacies.

The 2 Biggest Challenges of the Small College Strength & Conditioning Setting

1. Sharing the weightroom with NARPS*.
If you happen to coach in a facility that is solely for athletics, or at least just PE and athletics, then you are in as good of a situation as you can ask for. This seems like an absurd idea for DI schools, but this is fairly common for small schools. This becomes a scheduling nightmare and no one wins. There always happen to be tow differnt scenarios n either side of the continuum.

Either varsity teams have to wait for one douche-bag to finish his 40 sets of quarter-squats while wearing an altitude mask.
Or, there is the regular person who enjoys training and the entire team of Lax-Bros show up post-practice smelling like they were marinated in BO, ball-sweat, and ass-funk.

Either side of the spectrum, no one is happy in either of these situations.
*Non-Athletic Regular People

2. Not Seeing your Athletes from May until August.
There are some students that stay on campus all summer due to employment or summer classes. Small rural colleges are at a disadvantage with the former and a lot of private schools do not offer summer classes. Some urban schools have an advantage in this sense. But, most schools send their athletes home with an outdated, oversimplified training manual that may or may not be followed. Even at the high school level, the players can train all summer and are even allotted non-equipment practices in some states.

This always puts strength coaches in a dilemma and requires some kind of conditioning and performance tests so coaches can "see if they did anything this summer". Well, if you had any doubts, that is not a good sign. Most big schools do their performance testing a week or 2 before report day because their athletes were there all summer.

This can also hurt with conditioning. For smaller schools, fall camp is needed to prepare their team physically. Most small school coaches assume the worst and ensure that conditioning levels are high by addressing it during camp. This process skips a fundamental element about why people don't get the whole idea of conditioning. Summer conditioning is not designed to get an athlete ready for their season. It's designed to get them ready for camp. Time needed for technical and tactical development is often spend fatiguing athletes based some on fear ad some on necessity.

5 Fallacies that Inhibit Physical Development

1. Speed sessions and lifting session cant be separated.
This is especially untrue if you do not have adequate track, court, or field space near your weight room. By having a "running" session at different time than the lift has a few advantageous. First, you can schedule these speed sessions outside the normal schedule grid with multiple teams. This will ensure the coach isn't out of the weight room during the peak hours. This brings me to my next point...

2. Every team must lift as a team.
The off-season is the time to be selfish for athletes. They are responsible for their own physical improvement and change the impact they will have on (and for) their team. Finding a time where every team will be available to lift as a team is ridiculous if you have a small or shared facility. Remember, every team will have a similar academic schedule and all of them want to train at the same time. This is not going to happen. This is especially hard to sell to the coaching during the season (if you are lucky enough that they decide to lift during the season).

Coaches often want their teams to lift after practice because either

they "don't want them tired for practice" or
they "don't want to have their athletes come to the facility twice."

Both are sub-optimal. This is the classic case of a coach "checking boxes" and having their team lift weights just to say they lift weights. This is why part of the strength coach's job is to educate sport coaches. Some of them just may not know. This hierarchy may help:

Best Option: Lift at a separated time from practice like the morning. This way they will get a few meals in before practice. This can stay consistent with High-Low CNS sequencing and athletes will benefit more from practice and strength training from this schedule.

Next Best: Lift before practice. Incorporate explosive,heavy movements which are low-volume and cap the total time assigned. Be Efficient and purposeful.

Worst Option: Lift after practice. This usually always means the coach is somewhat lazy or soft. Or just uneducated about physiology. There are so many things sub-optimal about this, If you are stuck training a team after practice then make the best of it.

For a detailed look at training athletes in-season at the small school level, check out A Better Way to Train High School Athletes webinar.

3. My teams can't get strong training 2-days per week.
This is bullshit as most of you already know. There are some sport coaches that don't believe this, but that is part of the education process that strength coaches are destined to engage in. The fact is a 2-day plan works and if you add a third speed and agility session, this plan becomes fairly comprehensive. Look, I realize that a 3 or 4 day plan is more optimal, but I did the math when I coached at Denison.

Let's say you have 500 student athletes and your weight room holds about 25 at a time (not that unrealistic). Now, if every team is lifting 2x per week, that is 1000 sessions. One thousand divided by 25 is 40. That means you will need 40 sessions per week. So 8 hours a day of training is reasonable (unless you are coaching a sport). That's IF you can evenly distribute 500 athletes throughout the week into 8 equal segments. Spreading those sessions across 12 -16 hours is probably more realistic. Add a 3rd session for every athlete and you can see how mismanaged this can get. I realize strength coaches understand this when they signed up for the gig. I'm just trying to prove a point that a two day split is a manageable option to achieve outstanding results.

Here is a simple two-day split that we used at DU.

Day 1:
Snatch, Push Press, Squat, GHR, Row

Day 2:
Clean, RDL, Bench, Chin, Lunge

Add an extra speed and agility session, some rotational power, plyos, and short sprints on day 1 or 2 and you have a solid plan.

I also outline a two day split in more detail in that same webinar, A Better Way to Train High School Athletes.

4. You don't need to prioritize sports.
Remember, you are the head coach of the weightroom as Joe Kenn says. You have an obligation to the University athletic department. You must keep the first interest of the entire department in mind as opposed to an individual marquee sport. Unless, of course, if that sport's head coach hired you.

So scheduling can become downright catty. Remember, every coach has their own agenda and not all have theirown athletes' best interest in mind, let alone athletes from another sport. In order to prioritize sports, I needed a system, and I needed parameters for that system to follow

Priority Teams
1.In-Season
2.Pre-Season (non-traditional)
3.Off-Season
4.Post-Season

So for D3, here's how they would match up.
Fall Sports: Football, Field Hockey, Volleyball, M&W Soccer
Winter Sports: M&W Basketball, M&W Track&Field, M&W Swim & Dive, Wrestling
Spring Sports: Baseball, Softball M&W Track & Field, M&W Lacrosse, M&W Tennis

1st Semester, 1st Qtr (September - October) - 7wks
In-Season: Fall Sports
Non-Traditional-Season: Spring Sports
Off-Season: Winter Sports
Post-Season: None

1st Semester, 2nd Qtr (October - December) - 7wks
In-Season: Fall & Winter
Pre-Season: Winter
Off-Season: Spring
Post-Season: Fall

2nd Semester, 1st Qtr (January - March) - 8wks
In-Season: Winter
Pre-Season: Spring
Off-Season: Fall
Post-Season: None

2nd Semester, 2nd Qtr (March - May) - 6wks
In-Season: Spring
Non-Traditional Season: Fall
Off-Season: None
Post-Season: Winter

So now it is the strength & conditioning coach's job to figure how he/ she will communicate to the sport coaches and schedule those blocks. If I showed you the schedule grid we used, you would poop your pants. As long as you as the coach can justify your reasoning behind the classifications, you were OK. In order to further objectively quantify this hierarchy, we added more parameters in addition to the season.

Commitment
1. Number of cancellations, reschedules, and overall attendance to training sessions.
Physical Demands of Sport
1. Collision/ Combat
2. Contact
3. Non-Contact
4. No Contact

5. Every team must have an individualized program.
I realize there are a lot of coaches that will preach that every program written has to match the specific needs of each athlete. My contention is this. Is there any athlete playing any position of any sport that wouldn't benefit from squatting, sprinting, jumping, pulling, pressing, rowing, etc.?

Having a general template is not to be confused with a cookie cutter program. Standardizing templates can cure some logistical headaches. Especially when you have some mixed groups of athletes from various teams in the same sessions. This would happen quite frequently and would cases us to assign a differentiated number of athletes per rack depending on size of the entire group, the numbers per group, and the greatest common demonstrator for those groups. I discuss in detail this organization with large groups in this webinar:

5 Strategies to Perform More Work in Less Time

Overall, the general attitude for small school strength and conditioning coaches has to emit a sense of self confidence with a small ego. These coaches have done less with more and without the logo on the shirt to impress other coaches at conferences. Coaches that train 20-30 sports with no assistants while coaches another sports and teaching classes have gained a huge amount of respect in my book. Probably while losing a large amount of thier sanity. That is why I have and will always ask What is Really Wrong with Strength and Conditioning?