The History of Strength and Conditioning Coaches in Football
It is often said that in football, the game is won before either team steps onto the field. The coaches will have broken down game film to uncover weaknesses in their opposition. Players, withered and recovering from last week’s bout, will have practiced the game plan ad nauseam, with their assignments drilled into their heads and their techniques integrated into the fabric of muscle memory.
But before the playbook is written, before the pads are strapped, and before the players practice the fundamentals of their position, every member of a football team begins their season in the weight room. Football, for all its strategic complexities, is a game that at its core is predicated on the basic human measurement of strength, size and propulsion. A lineman must be able to explode off the line of scrimmage to force his man off of him, otherwise he will be defeated time and time again. A cornerback must have the strength to jam and disrupt a receiver’s timing before he runs downfield. Ball carriers, be it the I formation halfback or the option quarterback, must have solid mass if he is to withstand the punishment from men flying in to hit him at full speed to tackle him to the ground.
Strength training in the game of football has become so visible that it has taken on a subculture of its own, ranging from fitness enthusiast to sports scientist to sportswear manufactures that launch entire clothing lines for strength training. It’s an area of coaching that has become essential, brining in money that has transformed small rusty weight rooms with a few barbells in the middle of the floor to state of the art workout facilities full of classical and modern innovative equipment for research-based training regimens tailored to each individual athlete.
Given it’s current popularity, however, one would be surprised to see how sports such as weight lifting and powerlifting were at one point discouraged by athletic coaches due to the fear that these training methods would impede the athlete’s mobility and speed.
“I don’t know where that came from, but it couldn’t be further from the truth,” said Boyd Epley, the first full time strength and conditioning coach in college football history. “There’s no faster way to improve your speed than squats. It’s force against the ground.”
While strength training did not become a standard practice until the late 1960s, sports such as weightlifting and bodybuilding each had their own modest popularity in American culture dating back as far as the late 19th century, often times included as an attraction in a vaudeville show or displayed in other public events that featured performance art.
Once the 1920s arrived, athletes were still discouraged from participated in strongman sports given that most coaches believed that lifting weights would slow down a player’s speed, forcing him to resort to manual labor to build muscle and strength, if needed. But as the decade went on, pioneers and entrepreneurs within the weightlifting industry, most notably Bob Hoffman, owner of the York Barbell Company and founder of Strength & Health magazine, promoted the sport through public demonstrations in schools and by profiling the world’s most accomplished weightlifters and bodybuilders in his magazine.
Hoffman’s strategic publicity campaigns of these sports did not go unnoticed by the college players and coaches at the time, as one of his contributors to the magazine, carpenter and priest Father Bernard Lange, published a series of articles about the science and benefits of weight training. Lange, a graduate of Notre Dame University, would be invited by a former undergraduate classmate and Fighting Irish head coach Knute Rockne to teach his weight training methods to his players, though the participation in Lange’s workshops were not mandatory. Testimonials written by football players would soon circulate in Strength & Health magazine, commenting on how weight training improved their performances on the gridiron.
While the 30s and 40s saw a few successful college football programs like the University of Southern California and Penn State University claiming to have adopted some weight training methods into their curriculum, it wouldn’t be until after World War II when weight training’s popularity would skyrocket among American men. Many universities began offering weight training courses and even built new facilities on campus to meet the growing demands on student interest. The time had also arrived when weight training was beginning to be viewed admirably by coaches rather than treated with skepticism, as many track, baseball and even basketball programs utilized weight training in their practices.
It wouldn’t be until 1958, however, that weight training in college football would enter into the national spotlight by virtue of the Louisiana State University Tigers being voted the National Champions of the NCAA following their 7-0 Sugar Bowl victory over Clemson University.
Following the 1957 season, Tiger’s head coach Paul Dietzel, having endured three straight non-winning seasons since being hired, was in dire need to turn his program around for fear of losing his job. Aware of Dietzel’s struggles, Baton Rouge Gym owner Alvin Roy approached coach Dietzel and offered to formulate a weight training program that could increase his team’s performance. Dietzel, still under the opinion that muscle slows down athletes, accepted Roy’s offer, not only because he felt that he had nothing to lose, but also because two of his starting halfbacks, Billy Cannon and Jimmy Taylor, had trained extensively at Roy’s gym, and were, as Dietzel described, “bull strong.”
Roy, stationed in Paris, France in the immediate aftermath of World War II, served as an assistant to Bob Hoffman in the weeks leading up the 1946 Men’s World Weightlifting Championships in Paris. Under Hoffman’s guidance, Roy began to learn that contrary to popular belief, weight training not only increased strength but also increased speed and flexibility of athletes, having witnessed members of the American team perform acrobatic flips and gymnastic stunts with grace. Now exposed to the potential of barbell training, Roy trained with Hoffman in York, Pennsylvania, before returning to his home state of Louisiana to open a gym and to debunk the misconceptions athletes and coaches held about weight training.
Roy’s barbell training began to attract attention from local athletes that trained at his gym, often times in secret as to not disobey their coaches. While individually their results were astounding, Roy, believing that his theory would be best put to the test if adopted by an entire team, solicited his services to his former high school, Istrouma High. After a few years of failed sales pitches, Roy was able to convince the coaching staff to try his training program free of charge. His regimen included low repetitions and a high amount of sets of power cleans, bench presses, rowing motions, deadlifts, dumbbell presses and squats.
Shortly after implementing this plan, Billy Cannon, at the time a track and basketball star that was entering his senior year, began his weight training journey that would contribute to his eventual All-American halfback status. Cannon and the team, by the start of the season, had seen drastic results from Roy’s regimen. Former powerlifter and author Terry Todd described the results in a 1992 article written about Roy:
What happened by the fall is that only one of the 40 boys who had trained during the spring, during the summer or both failed to gain at least nine pounds of body weight. Some gained as much as 30… And on the field they were literally unstoppable. Not only did they win all of their 13 games, but they scored 432 points in the process, more than had ever been scored in a season by a high school team in Louisiana, and four of their players made All- State. As for Cannon, he amassed a state record 229 points, averaged 10 yards per carry and was the most highly rated high school back in the United States.
Once Roy’s opportunity came to train the LSU Tigers Football team, his method of ten to fifteen repetitions and two sets from a selection of olympic and bodybuilding lifts proved to have equally profound results as they did with the Istrouma High team. Having gone undefeated, the Tigers were awarded the consensus title of National Champions and had a handful of players listed with either SEC and All-America honors. Paul Dietzel, lauded for his willingness to embrace weight training and for his “three-platoon” system, won SEC Coach of the Year honors.
The football world had now taken notice of weight training as a legitimate way to enhance a player’s performance. The University of Washington in 1959 adopted their own offseason weight training program, and improved upon their 3-7 record in 1958 to a 10-1 season with a 44-6 Rose Bowl victory over the Wisconsin Badgers. The 1963 Texas Longhorns won the Cotton Bowl and were named National Championships after they committed to heavy weightlifting in the offseason. Ara Parseghian, Notre Dame's head coach from 1964-1974, courted Father Bernard Lange back to Notre Dame to organize team workouts for the 1966 season, resulting in a 9-0-1 season and their first National Championship since 1949.
Though more schools were utilizing weight training for the football programs, none of these trainers were full time members of the coaching staff and were more often than not gym owners that either offered to their services for love of their alma mater, or simply to disprove previous theories about weight training. This would all change when Boyd Epley was hired by the University of Nebraska to become the first full time strength and condition coach in college football history.
“When I was an athlete at Nebraska, strength training didn’t exist,” Boyd says. “Weightlifting had been around for many, many years. Powerlifting had just gotten started in the mid 60s, and bodybuilding had been around since the 30s. There wasn’t strength training for athletes.”
After accepting a track scholarship to the University of Nebraska, Boyd excelled as a pole vaulter, a success he largely attributes to studying the three strength sports: “I needed to run about forty yards carrying a pole, so I needed to improve my speed and power in the pole vaulting event. So I decided to dedicate myself for three years in each of those three areas, and competed in all of them.”
At the time, agility drills coupled with long distance running was the standard method of getting football players prepared for the season, a formula that the University of Nebraska prescribed to under head coach and athletic director Bob Devaney. While Nebraska under Devaney’s tenure was considered in the top echelon of programs in college football, two mediocre seasons made him rethink his approach in order to make Nebraska a powerhouse again.
Devaney’s did not have to search far from the Nebraska campus to find a solution, as he would reach out to track phenom Boyd Epley to demonstrate weight training to the team following the 1968 season. Boyd’s regimen, which included elements from the three strength sports he had studied, rather than just relying on one, produced tremendous results, as Nebraska would go on to be named the 1970 National Champions by the Associated Press. Bob’s forward thinking approach to strength training left a lasting impact on his assistant coaches, as many of them went on to spearhead strength and conditioning programs at coveted universities like the University of Miami and Ohio State University.
As the 1970s arrived, pro football was also beginning to hire strength and conditioning coaches on their staff. Alvin Roy, having moved to San Diego to train the San Diego Chargers during their American Football League Championship season in 1963, became the official strength coach for the 1970 Super Bowl winning Kansas City Chiefs, before moving on to the Dallas Cowboys and was last hired by the Oakland Raiders in 1979 before his untimely death. Roy’s protege, Louis Riecke, would go on to become the full time strength and conditioning coach for the Pittsburgh Steelers on their way to becoming a dynasty. Additionally, Clyde Emrich, a Chicago weightlifter that was contracted by George Halas as a strength consultant in 1963, was hired as Bears first full time strength coach in 1971.
Now that “strength training” has become a necessary component of football, the fitness industry and physical scientists would take notice of training methods and conducted research find and introduce new methods of strength training. Kim Wood, a freelance strength coach that worked for a multitude of different NFL teams in the late 60s, was one of the earliest proponents of the Nautilus machines, created by Arthur Jones, and integrated these machines into his workout regimen when he was hired by Paul Brown in 1971 to oversee the Bengals strength and conditioning program. Nautilus machines would become increasingly popular throughout the 1970s and provided teams with a more diverse training approach.
The role of computers and analytics was introduced as well by Bob Ward, a scientist hired by Tom Landry to aide Alvin Roy in the strength and conditioning program. The Strength and Condition Coaches Hall of Fame explains Bob’s contributions:
To provide his players a performance edge, he improvised a system of computer-driven analytics which enabled coaches to break down actual athletic movements rather than rely on statistics. He also instituted a form of psycho-cybernetics by applying the tensile strength of surgical tubing to induce greater speed.
As the depth of the field increased, there was a demand to create an organization in which information, research, and up to date methods of training could be shared and discussed. Thus, the National Strength and Condition Association was formed in 1978, led by President Boyd Epley, to further the education of strength training. As the research and education since this time has expanded tremendously, many trainers like Boyd understand and embrace new methods, particularly in field of research that has individualized player development.
“Where we’re at today, schools are using research labs and experts and development fields to individualize programs for each individual athlete and what’s best for them,” said Boyd. “It’s not quite where it needs to be yet, but that where we’re headed.”
While it remains to be seen what strength and conditioning coaching staffs will implement next to give their players the winning edge, it can assured that the progression of the athlete would not and is still not possible without the men that have taken the game of football and made it a twelve month commitment. From the rise of team workouts using weights and machine to tailored made workout plans that uses a variety of specialized equipment and alternative concepts, it’s all but guaranteed that strength and conditioning programs will only continue to grow more complex as the game itself.
REFERENCES
Lukacs, John D. “Programs Decades in the Making.” ESPN, ESPN Internet Ventures, 22 June 2010, www.espn.com/college-football/news/story?id=5312405.
Harris, Aron. “Interview with Boyd Epley .” 6 July 2020.
Shurley, Jason P., et al. Strength Coaching in America: a History of the Innovation That Transformed Sports. University of Texas Press, 2020.
Todd, Terry, Al Roy: Mythbreaker, Iron Game History, 1992
USA Strength and Conditioning Coaches Hall of Fame, www.usastrengthcoacheshf.com/.
Roach, Randy. Muscle, Smoke and Mirrors. AuthorHouse, 2011.