Want to know why you should get all your athletes in the weight room? James Coffey, Maine high school athletic director and coach, can explain.

Starting and maintaining a unified strength program for your entire athletic department is easily one of the most beneficial things you can do as an athletic director. It’ll help you build a winning tradition, prevent injuries, improve physical and mental strength—and definitely help you tally up wins.

So why doesn’t every high school in the country have one?

Well, that’s complicated.

Certainly there are schools in this country that have top-notch weight rooms that rival many colleges, but that’s the minority. There are also schools, particularly in districts where money is tight, that have nothing. No weight room, no strength coach, and maybe not even an athletic trainer. 

In my previous district, it took a full five years to entirely implement our strength program. We had some resources, but it still involved a lot of trial and error before we really had high participation and a rock-solid program. Once it was implemented, we offered the program after school, and in the summer, we had a program running three days a week. The first summer after implementing the full program, our combined athletic department fall record was 92-13. 

We’re now in my current school’s fourth year of having one strength program. After some improvements to our weight room, and settling in with a highly respected local strength coach, we’re starting to see player improvement and fewer injuries. 

If you’re looking to start a strength program at your school, there are two main elements you need: a room and someone to run the program. 

Use what you have

Do you have a weight room currently? If so, is the equipment safe and up-to-date? If you don’t have one, try to find an open space you could use. 

My school’s weight room was super small. It was cluttered with old Nautilus equipment and big bulky machines. We actually gave away a bunch of the old equipment we weren’t using to create more space. Then we discovered a storage room adjacent to the weight room that was full of old, unused equipment. We got rid of a lot, found another space to store the rest and knocked the wall down between the storage room and our weight room. That expanded our weight room by over 500 square feet. 

We laid down a new rubber floor, bought a mint condition rack of dumbbells (5’s-100’s) from a local resident, and were able to secure three new power racks. In a few months, spending just the money we had available, we were able to significantly upgrade our facility.

A lot of second-hand equipment is still in great shape and costs a fraction of what you’d spend on new weights.

Who runs it? 

In a perfect world, you’d have an expansive weight room and a nationally certified strength and conditioning coach, but it’s just not the reality for most schools. For a lot of athletic departments, only the football program does any strength training and that’s usually run by the coaching staff. 

So what resources do you have that you could leverage? Do you have a PE teacher, coach or an athletic trainer that has a background or certification in strength training? Is there a local gym you could contract through? Is a parent/guardian or booster group connected with a strength coach in the area?

In one school I worked in, we contracted a respected national organization to come in and run a two day, in-service workshop for our coaches. All of our coaches were certified to their standards, and we used that training to implement a strength program for our athletes. It worked well for us.

My current school contracts through a respected local gym that’s geared toward athletic performance. They provide us great service at a reasonable cost.

Create a program for everyone

Our program is simple, yet effective. We aren’t sport-specific, and that’s key. Our goal is to make our kids stronger, better athletes through a foundation built on basics. We change the exercises each session, but every workout follows the same simple structure:

1. Push something
2. Pull something
3. Squat
4. Hip hinge
5. Carry something

Make sure to have a lot of varying weight options to cater to all your athletes.

This broad framework allows you to differentiate instruction between kids based on their abilities. Not by sport. Every athlete in every sport can benefit from a strength program. And so can your school.

 

Building your athletic department brand is the first step in creating state cham­pi­onship-caliber programs. These principles can help you get started.

Seventeen years ago, when I started at Springfield Central High School as an assistant principal, we had one of the lowest performing athletic programs in the Western Massachusetts region and one of the largest student bodies in the Commonwealth. 

There’s plenty of proud history at this inner-city school—our gym not only displays state title banners, but also the jerseys of past alums who made it to the NBA and MLB. However, the school was in the midst of a dramatic downturn in athletic success and there was little to boast about when I arrived.

Fast forward nearly two decades. Across the board, our teams are some of the most competitive in our state’s highest level. Our boys’ and girls’ basketball teams routinely reach the final weekend of postseason. Our wrestling program often wins state championships, and our football team is now considered one of the most powerful in New England. During live recruiting periods, coaches from the Big Ten, ACC, Ivy, and Patriot Leagues visit our school. 

In 2018 our football team became the first to win a statewide MIAA football championship in Western Mass.

The turning point? Our brand. Building it has been a slow, methodical process with many bumps along the way, and we continue to work hard at it every day of the year. But it’s also been a tremendous learning opportunity, with the benefits far exceeding our expectations. 

If you’re about to start your own brand-building journey, keep these principles in mind.

You can’t do it alone.

A team of like-minded people working alongside you is key to your initiative. I was lucky to have an administrative colleague share my views about the potential of our brand. 

Together, we systematically made decisions that helped us gain traction towards our ultimate goal. We scrutinized every hire and tried to find individuals that were excellent in the classroom and accomplished coaches.  

As a rule, we hire people, not resumes. Some of the most successful, effective, and influential people in our building started off as uncertified teachers working towards their advanced degrees. And any time we get a chance to hire an alumni, we do. We believe they have an intrinsic loyalty to the school and can relate to our current students. Our goal is to create a family atmosphere.  

Bottom line—it takes a village. Find someone with like minded views to help you kick-start your goals. 

The best ability? Repeatability.

We created a school motto that we could take immense pride in, “Home to Scholars and Champions.” Years ago, we noticed a school from the West Coast had a similar motto and was extremely successful for its area. Their students were no different than ours, so we thought, “If that school could manifest their own destiny, why not us?” Our motto was born and we never stopped pushing it.

Seventeen years later, “Home to Scholars and Champions” is what people know us by. We’ve tagged it everywhere we could—our stationary, our hallways, our gymnasium wall—and every time students underperform, we point out our motto is the expectation. 

This catchy, repeatable motto is relative to almost anything in life. A scholar-athlete is more specific to the classroom, but a champion is a champion in life. 

Combine consistency and creativity.

As part of our process, we realized our school’s logo needed an upgrade. Two of our most dynamic coaches came up with the solution.

Our current football coach took over a decade ago and wanted to create a unique identity for us. He created our “C” logo, an inverted two-tone twist on the University of Miami’s iconic “U” logo. All of our sports teams use the “C” in their uniforms. When anyone sees our gear, they immediately know it’s Springfield Central. 

Meanwhile, our wrestling coach had been toying with another logo with our mascot, the Golden Eagles. So we combined that eagle with our “C” to create a fierce logo, a singular identity. This new logo will adorn our newly-renovated basketball court starting in the 19-20 school year.

One logo for all the teams strengthens our brand.

Rally the community.

When you’re an inner city school, everything that goes wrong in the city gets equated with the school system. It’s a tough reputation to shed. As hard as we tried, people just didn’t find academic success that interesting. It’s hard to get the attention of the media from a positive perspective. 

But when you have an athletic win, they’re almost forced to put it in the paper. And our brand could be out in the community in a positive way.

It’s amazing how many people will stop you on the street to say, “Hey, you’re having a great year.” They have no idea what you’re doing academically, but when they see your name in the paper for athletics, it connects positive thoughts to your school.

I recently researched how many times our athletic teams garnered headlines in a local news outlet versus how many times we were mentioned for academic reasons. The ratio was 97 to 1. When we quantified this with a projected advertising cost, it equated to tens of thousands of dollars.

We’ve been fortunate to get the full support of our city’s political community. They want to see us be successful academically and socially, and our positive identity allows us to get the support we need. 

You’ll see them at games—our mayor, our superintendent, school committee members, city councilors—cheering for us, proud of us. It drives home that what we do as an athletic department is important. 

We also try to bring back alumni as much as possible. Travis Best, who was a McDonald’s All-American a quarter-century ago at Central and went on to great success in the NBA, can always be found in our stands when he’s in town. His jersey is the only retired number for any of our athletic programs. 

Every year we hear stories from students who have dreamed about becoming a Central High School Golden Eagle. It’s a great feeling to know your school is providing amazing academic and co-curricular opportunities for students who are historically disadvantaged. We’ve even had students turn down full-scholarship opportunities from prep schools to become part of our community. 

We don’t have all of the answers but we hope to continue to improve, grow and develop. Resources like this blog can help us, and other schools across the country, share ideas and best practices to ensure positive experiences and future opportunities for student-athletes everywhere. 

Tad Tokarz has been a high school administrator for 18 years, working his entire career in an urban district. He also teaches adjunct classes focused on educational leadership, special education and professional development at American International College.

 

Using our video tools is an easy and effective way to showcase your players and engage with your fans.

It’s not just for football — film can and should be a part of every team’s routine. Athletic director Jameson Pelkey explains how his water polo and wrestling teams use Hudl.

Team culture takes the combined effort of coaches and players. In this blog, volleyball coach Lindsay Peterson explains how coaches can start building the right traditions.

I’ll never forget my first collegiate volleyball game. It was the first time I’d been through the actual warm-up with the team. We did all the normal things; warm up our arms, pepper, work on team defense, etc. 

Then right before our time was done, the seniors pulled us into the huddle and told us there was a chant we always did before every match. A cheer that started off just a whisper and ended as a scream by the end. A cheer that in few words described just how good we thought we were. 

This chant was a ritual—it never changed. Game after game, we spoke those words. It was exhilarating, it made my blood pump, my heart race, and let me know that we were all in this together.

I look back at the moment and realize the complexity of that simple cheer. It was tied to every game in the years I was in that program, including a Division II national title, countless wins and broken records. It’s important to have these positive traditions in your program, whether it’s cheers, chants, dirty sock rituals or the thousands of other things your team could do to get excited about games. I’m a firm believer in positive traditions + positive leadership = positive team culture.

There are two sides to my team’s culture: how the coach and staff build traditions to facilitate positive culture, and how team leaders help establish that culture. In this first blog, I’ll focus on the coaches’ side. 

Pre-Season

I had a coach tell me once to always work players extremely hard in your first practice of the year, then at the end of that practice ask them what they want to be known for. I tried it and the results were great. 

Kids are eager to tell you what they think. Now for us, winning and losing isn’t who we are. The things we stand for and how hard we’re willing to work, that’s who we are. Having my players establish “who we are,” and what we want to be known for, is imperative for us to begin our season. 

Most of my teams agree on something close to the same thing every year: tenacious, relentless, competitive, a never-give-up attitude, hard-working, hard to defend, supportive, etc.  Every year will be different because each year’s team is different. Even your leadership might change. But you can sustain team culture in your gym by establishing who you are. 

During the Season

As the season begins and then progresses, make sure you’re establishing consistencies. For instance, before every home match, my team comes in early and sets up the nets. Then they spend the next 30 minutes serving and passing. 

It’s also a tradition for the team to gather at my house twice a year for “practice.” We play games, eat snacks and watch motivational movies. Other traditions could be team dinners, team-building days, themed practices, program game days. There’s a plethora of inexpensive, or even free, activities for your players to participate in that are beneficial for your team culture. 

Make these activities sustainable and worthwhile, and plan them in advance so it’s easy to stick to them.

Post-Season  

The end of the year is almost as important as the beginning. To make sure the culture you’ve been building all year will carry on, use your banquet to remind your players of all the things they accomplished throughout the year. You could even use awards to emphasize what’s most important for a positive culture. 

At Millard North, we give out the Mustang Award to the player who has put in the work and never gave up during hardships. The best part of this award is that it usually winds up being a kid who doesn’t always get the “clout.” 

For example, one year it was a middle who started in the first 25 matches of the year. She replaced an injured Division I hitter, worked incredibly hard, and we went undefeated during the time she started. When it was time for the injured player to come back, she didn’t give up. She continued to give it her all, became a leader on the practice side, and pushed us to be the best we could be. She gave herself completely and didn’t complain one time! That’s why this award is so important to me and to my program culture. 

Positive team culture is a direct reflection of the leadership provided by your coaching staff. Find ways to promote culture on your court and in your program. The long-lasting benefits will be worth all your time and effort.

Lind­say Peter­son has been a var­si­ty head coach for eight years. She played for the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Alaba­ma, help­ing them win the DII Nation­al Cham­pi­onship in 2003. Peter­son has led her Mil­lard North High School team to the state cham­pi­onship tour­na­ment sev­en times, win­ning in 2016 and 2018. She was named one of the top 40 coach­es in the coun­try by the AVCA, and Coach of the Year by the Oma­ha World-Herald.