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Let’s start from the beginning. How did you get your start in a career in football?
My dad spent years trying to talk me into coaching — he told me I’d be a fantastic basketball coach because that was my sport — but I wanted no part of it. I wanted the glitz and glam of professional sports in a sports marketing sense. I thought that was my passion. I didn’t find a job in marketing, but I did find a passion for working with athletes and coaching, and that’s where I was introduced to strength and conditioning. The girls on the team kept getting ACL injuries, so I turned to Todd Wright, who was the head strength coach at the University of Texas at the time and whom I saw speak at a high school basketball conference. I saw what he was doing with the players and how he wasn’t using a traditional weight room model. It was like this light bulb moment of, This is what I want to do! I went back to school to get my master’s degree in strength and conditioning from the University of Miami, because it had a program specific to sport performance instead of general exercise physiology. I went back to the University of Texas to do an internship, and as life takes you on different paths, I ended up in the military aspect.
The military was really making a push toward human performance, hiring contractors to set up models similar to what you see in college athletics and professional sports. I took that opportunity and spent three years with Army and two years with Air Force special forces, which is where I met Mike Clark, who was Dan Campbell’s head strength coach at Texas A&M many years ago (during Campbell’s college playing days). That’s how I got into football. When Coach Campbell got the head coaching job in Detroit, he made a call to Coach Clark to be the human performance director, and I was the first person he asked to come with him.
So, what does your role entail?
Sports science was a fairly new profession in the U.S. when I was at Texas, but if you really wanted to write your ticket, you learned that side of things to pair with strength and conditioning. It’s about understanding what you’re tracking with different technology, why you’re tracking it and, better yet, how to communicate those findings with coaches, which I learned from my mentor, Sandy Abney. That aspect allows you to assess the effectiveness of your training program, any interventions that are needed and return-to-play plans, so I jumped in and learned as much as I could. Thankfully, what I did with the Air Force special forces was more on the sports science side — less strength and conditioning — so I was able to enhance my skills. Coach Clark liked that I could be in a dual role.
But I would say my role is more strength and conditioning. I’m on the floor coaching more often than I am working on the sports science side, because players need to warm up. Then we’re on the practice field, in the weight room, helping with recovery, all of that.
That makes sense. What does a week look like for you during the regular season?
On Monday, we immediately start looking at game data and the GPS metrics to understand the demands of the game and which players took a high load. The players do a recovery lift that day, as well. Players are off Tuesdays, so that’s our time to catch up on injury reports with the head of strength and conditioning, Josh Schuler, and start thinking about return-to-play protocols for players coming back from injury. Wednesdays and Thursdays are heavy-hitters. We have a lift in the morning, then the players practice. We also have a lift session after practice for whoever didn’t lift in the morning. I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon looking at practice data to get a report ready for Coach Campbell, telling him where certain players are at.
