Barbell Shrugged - How to Become a Professional Strength Coach w/ Scott Caulfield - 288

Episode Date: November 22, 2017

    Scott Caulfield is the Head Strength and Conditioning coach at National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA). Scott is responsible for the day-to-day supervision and training of all athletes, interns, and coaches at the NSCA’s 6,000-square-foot Performance Center at the NSCA National Headquarters. He works diligently to promote the NSCA and its coaches, including work with the Professional Baseball Strength and Conditioning Coaches Society (PBSCCS), the National Basketball Strength & Conditioning Association (NBSCA), as well as national governing bodies such as the U.S. Anti-Doping Association, United States Olympic Committee, U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, and U.S.A. Hockey. Scott shared with us his thoughts on how one can become a strength and conditioning coach, what the day-to-day might look like, coaching differences between high schools, colleges, and major league athletes, coaching salaries, and more. Enjoy! Mike, Doug and Team Barbell Shrugged   ► Download our free 54 page Olympic Weightlifting Training Manual at:   http://www.flightweightlifting.com  ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Barbell Shrugged helps people get better. Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT Weightlifting, Barbell Shredded and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast.. Find Barbell Shrugged here: Website: http://www.BarbellShrugged.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged Instagram: http://instagram.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Find Barbell Business Here: Website: http://www.BarbellBusiness.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellbusiness Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellbusiness Instagram: http://instagram.com/barbellbusinesspodcast

You have to do what you got to do to get the experience because you can have a degree in ex-phys and sports science and every certification under the sun but if you haven't actually coached anybody you're not going to get a job. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm your host, Mike Bledsoe. I'm joined by Dr. Andy Galpin, Doug Larson, and we're here in Las Vegas, Nevada at the NSCA conference. And we have the joy of sitting down with, or standing here with Scott Caulfield. You have, you're the NSCA strength coach, which is, I didn't know the NSCA actually had like a

head strength coach, which is really amazing. So we're excited to talk to you today. Yeah, I thought an interesting conversation today. Scott has had many of these positions we're about to mention, you know, high school, college, professional strength coaches. The world of strength conditioning is growing. You know, when I was in high school, I didn't have a high school strength coach at my high school. I was fortunate that I had a strength coach, which was awesome. When I got to college, same thing, didn't have a college strength coach. Scott's held many of these positions. He knows a bunch of people in these positions, and more importantly, he knows a bunch of people that hire people for these positions. So if you're a person

that you love strength conditioning, but you don't want to be a coach at a gym. You don't want to be a personal trainer. You might want to be a high school, college or professional strength coach. We're going to talk about how to do that today. Yeah. And that's what I'm most excited about. You know, in, in my field, I get asked this question all the time by my students. I want to be an NFL coach, strength coach or high school division one. I want to work with these players. How the hell do I do that? Where do I get started? What do I need? How does that happen? And then in particular, like you were talking about earlier, Mike,

about how you wanted to know what's that job actually like. So when you get that strength coach job at that Division I school, what does your day really look like as opposed to what you think it looks like? And I know you've been through all these things, so you can talk a lot about all that stuff. Yeah, I think that's a great place to start because I think strength coaching as a whole is growing. People are wanting to do it more and more. And there's opportunities. There's more opportunities than ever because high schools used to not have strength coaches, and now they do.

So what's that look like? What's day-to-day look like for high school versus college versus pro? Yeah, I mean, again, it depends on the level, right? But in the high school setting, you're really, a lot of times you might be an actual PE teacher who does strength and conditioning as well. A lot of places, though, are also now hiring just strength and conditioning coaches. And that's where you're going to work with those athletes. Again, you're within the context of a school, but you're going to be probably athletes. Again, you're within the context of a school, but you're gonna be probably after hours situation, training the athletes.

Although a lot of schools too, that are hiring these strength and conditioning positions, will have like a weight training class. Now, some schools will throw all of their only athletes into those classes, but others you might have regular students too. So it really depends in that situation. College, again, you're embedded with a team.

Your hours are dictated by school, by sport practices, by coaching schedules. And again, those hours are typically probably going to be a little bit longer. In high school, you have the summers off potentially. That's a nice way of saying it. Yeah. The hours are awful. The hours are awful. In the summers, you probably have it off in high school or that might be your opportunity to make a little extra money and run some camps, stuff like that. College, again,

you're embedded with a team. You're probably going to be traveling with that team or teams, depending on what the setting is. And in professional, obviously you're just responsible for this specific amount of athletes. But again, the time demands with the level of preparation that it takes at the professional level is going to be way higher than any of the other ones. So what's been your experience? Have you done high school, college, and pro? Yeah, so I've had a little bit of experience in each of those as a strength and conditioning coach. So when I really started my career, I was working with high school athletes, mostly in a private sports performance setting. So they would come in, I would train them after hours, after coaching hours.

But then after that, I worked for a semi-pro basketball team. So the ABA, American Basketball Association, one with the red, white, and blue ball. So that was actually still going strong in the mid-2000s. Is that still around? There's a very few teams that still play in it, but it was kind of making a comeback in the early 2000s, mid-2000s. So I was a strength coach for the Vermont Frost Tees in 2006. There was about 34 teams or 35 teams in the ABA,

and this is like low-level semi-pro basketball, right? So we traveled by buses. We trained out of a commercial facility. We didn't have our own training facility. So, I mean, this was in addition to all the other stuff, right, that I was doing. This job was not sexy paying the bills. It was awesome to be a part of, but, I mean, I was basically making nothing to get this experience. So working with these guys who were, who were very high level athletes. So these were

athletes that were either just trying to make it to the NBA or the D league or to play overseas professionally, or maybe they were coming back from their careers over there and trying to extend it by playing more, um, long bus rides, crazy hours, different training times. You know, like I said, I was sometimes carrying my own kettlebells into the gym that we trained at and bands to train these guys the way I wanted to train them. And then after that, I went to Dartmouth College where I was a strength coach for football, men's and women's swimming, and rugby.

And again, there I was embedded with those teams and just working straightforward. So now, like you said too, I do through my current job, have a ton of different connections with the professional organizations and very good friends with both high school collegiate and professional strength coaches. So I know really more about the day-to-day from talking to all those people and how their lives go on a regular basis yeah i'm sure some people a lot of people that are in that are in love with strength and conditioning are thinking i want to have one of these jobs in your experience in your opinion

what have been the pros and cons of high school so it sounds like the high school strength coach their job is very different than the pro right and you have different things available to you so what are the pros and cons say of high school I think from the one thing I would say for high school is it can be so resource wise it can be so hit or miss so there's some really incredible private high schools that just have every resource that have better weight rooms and some colleges do, but there's others that are just scraping by and they're barely getting it. So I think one of them is going to be resources, right? One of them is going to be the space that you have. A lot of time, high school gyms, again, could be good, could be bad. I think hours in your

high school setting, again, might be better overall because typically you're going to have those kids after school. You know that's at times. If you're not a teacher as well, you're going to just be responsible for that. But, again, if you're teaching, then also you're probably making more money because you probably have a teaching salary and then a coaching stipend. He might be hard to say, but what would generally be a coaching stipend for a high school strength coach?

Say you don't work there, but you just come in. Yeah, I think it depends too, but I mean it can be anywhere from like $3,000 to $10,000. I mean it really depends on the program. So you're not making a living probably. Are there booster clubs available? So I think that's something when people think, too, and kind of when I first started, you know, it was like you had to make this position. And I grew up in Vermont.

That's where I'm originally from. I always joke around that, like, New England is kind of like five to ten years behind the rest of the United States anyway. But some people hadn't heard of this stuff, right? So you might have to go and propose this thing to an administrator or to even a sport coach. The first college team I worked with before the ABA team was actually at a place called Norwich University, which is the oldest military university in Vermont.

And I was doing this little class at the gym that I worked at for some third and fourth graders. And one of the parents that was in that class was the rugby coach at Norwich. And he came up to me afterwards and he's like, hey, do you think you could do this for like rugby athletes? I had no idea what rugby even was at the time. And I was like, yeah, sure, man. Like, yeah, I could probably figure it out.

Then he and I talked about the sport and the demands of the sport. And then it kind of snowballed into that. A lot of times you might be, if you have this idea and you know that a program doesn't have that already, you can go to them and talk to them about the benefits of strength and conditioning and show them why this is going to help their athletes be less injured and improve performance and you can sell yourself into that program. And generally, again, if you're going to do a good job

and people are going to hear about it and they're going they're gonna go man these kids are really fired up to train and they're seeing an impact on their sports performance people are gonna talk and then you're gonna end up getting more opportunities out of that. A lot of times especially in high school the person hiring you has no background in strength conditioning they're probably not fit like they don't they don't know the benefits of having a strength coach versus just you being a PE teacher where you're just like helping the kids burn calories like they have no idea what's going on so particularly in the high school setting but definitely in college and professional sports

as well but maybe potentially for different reasons like safety is probably a big thing to talk about like we're keeping these athletes healthy lower injury rates keep the best players playing you know ACL tears shoulder, shoulder surgeries, et cetera. Like you're gonna have to sell the safety of having a strength coach and why not only are you going to have the athletes be stronger and faster and score more touchdowns in the whole deal, but you know, you're going to make it where the athletes don't get hurt during the season. Yeah, absolutely.

And the best, the best also analogy that I've heard that works really well with high school administrators too, is it's like nobody would build a swimming pool and then not hire certified lifeguards to watch that swimming pool right so how at this high school are you going to make this weight room and then be like well we don't actually need the math teachers can supervise it right yeah yeah why not you know and oftentimes too in in the sport high school setting you might again, again, be the PE teacher or just the person that played football, and so that's the de facto strength coach now. I think the swimming pool analogy really hits home with a lot of administrators and risk

management people, because they're like, oh, wow. Yeah, it's a good frame, yeah. You were saying, so is this fair to categorize the main job of a high school strength coach would really be long-term athletic development, right? So you're really not trying to maximize performance. You definitely want them to get stronger, faster, but you're really trying to build them so that they're not broken when they're 18 and 19, right? And they were great. You were all conference when you were 17, but now you're 21 and your shoulder doesn't work anymore. But when you move up the ladder, that goal starts to change, right? So the goal of a college strength coach and definitely the goal of an NFL or Major League Baseball strength coach is different.

So can you talk about really the job, even though they're all three strength coaches? What are their focuses and their outcomes? Yeah, absolutely. Like you just alluded to, the high school strength coach is working with kids from 9 to 12. And if you've ever seen these long-term athlete development pictures or whatever, we can have a 14-year-old that's 6'4", 250 pounds, and another one who's 5'7", 150 pounds. These kids are obviously very different from an athletic development standpoint, and they have to learn basic skills and basic movement patterns and a lot of the actually one of our high school strength

coaches that spoke here yesterday Micah Kurtz he's in South Carolina yeah they have actually gotten into now working with the third and fourth graders on basic movement skills and now these kids when they come in as freshmen to their program are so much for farther ahead of the game and so as you transition again a lot of times when we get kids in the college setting oftentimes they're good movers and they're able to do a lot of things sometimes you have somebody that right may have never touched away or never learned how to skip with kids today absolutely don't know how to skip sometimes don't know how to do certain movements. That's crazy.

It's baffling, yeah. And you're wondering, you know, again, there's more, you know, I guess there's more argument for why we need more high school strength coaches, but I would also say those high school strength coaches have such a better chance to really impact change on those athletes. Sounds like a huge opportunity. Huge opportunity. And there's so many And there's so many high schools across America that are under-resourced and under-manned in that aspect. A lot of times, if you are a PE teacher,

you probably also have to coach a couple other sports. Being the strength coach might be the last, like fourth job title that you want to have out of that whole thing yeah would you say because of your your concern with the the long-term athletic development of the high school kids it's more rewarding than working with college or pro i think i think it's kind of a continuum i think in college you're still going to see a good uh you can see a really good change over a course of four years you're definitely going to have them for four years.

In the professional setting, I mean, you're talking most of the time about tenths and hundredths, right? I mean, the changes that you might be able to make on some of the freak, top-of-the-line athletes in that level is so small. I really think that if you really love, love coaching, college and high school is where you're really going to see the most change. You're going to have a huge impact. Not that the professional coaches don't have an impact. They have a tremendous impact and their job is extremely important, but the levels of differences that they're going to make is so far different.

In the professional setting, again, and you've worked in baseball, you know, a lot of it is stress management. A lot of it is injury prevention far more than strength development, especially when you're talking about in-season, the bulk of the time that you have people, right? So I'd say that's another difference or interesting difference in college. Some colleges are going to make your higher know your higher level d1 top tier programs you're going to have those kids all year round they're going to be encouraged to stay at school in the summer yeah yeah other schools you're not going to be able to even within the three divisions one two and three of ncaa you know division three kids aren't allowed to have a supervised strength coach during

the summer. That's a specific rule within NCAA Division III. And then you have Division I, again, like you said, where it may be mandatory or it may not be. It depends on your setting. Yeah, that's something that people that are just a coach at a gym or they're a personal trainer and they're self-employed, they don't have to deal with all these all these rules and regulations that pro sports and college sports impose on you We're like, oh you can train them until this date and then you're not allowed to talk to them

You know for a couple months until season starts back up again You're like like really like what why not like why wouldn't you train year-round? And at some point you kind of story hands up in the air and you're like that's that's the rules I guess that guy just like I just play along So it's not ideal in every scenario with so many regulations you have to work around right And at some point, you kind of just throw your hands up in the air, and you're like, that's the rules, I guess. I've got to just play along. So it's not ideal in every scenario with so many regulations you have to work around. Right. But I think another thing, too, for people to think about, and one of the reasons I think you're seeing, we've all probably seen those articles on some of the college football salaries lately,

I mean, huge six-figure contracts for some of these guys, because strength and conditioning coaches actually get to spend more time with these athletes than some of these guys because the strength and conditioning coaches actually get to spend more time with these athletes than some of the sport coaches do some of the position coaches because of different times and periods of times and set hours that you can do x y and z strength coach actually is able to spend more time with those people therefore this position is a tr is the biggest value besides maybe your defensive line coach to that head football coach. I think that's a huge reason that you're seeing these salaries just skyrocket. It sounds like a pro, like being a college strength coach versus high school. High school, it sounds like you might be limited on resources, but you might be able to make a huge difference in somebody's life. College, there's a little less development going on,

a little more risk mitigation, but the salary is there. Yeah. That's actually, so Boyd Epley brought this up last night. If you don't know that guy's name, he's the guy that started strength and conditioning. He also founded the NSCA, but he was the guy that went to basically Nebraska, said we need to start doing this lifting stuff,

and they weren't really for it. He started training their teams. This is early 70s, right? Yep. They got really big, and if you know anything about college football, Nebraska dominated the 1970s. The world realized this, and this is what everyone realized. We've got to have strength and conditioning, right? And he talked about this last night. He just, he said, you know, when I started, even at the Division I level, I had to talk myself into a job, just like you talked about earlier with the high school kids. But now, I mean, some of those Division I strength coaches are making not only six figures,

but they're making almost seven figures, $600,000 a year, $700,000 a year. And that has trickled down. And so even though you mentioned the high school coaches might only be making five or ten grand a year the ability to make a thirty thousand dollar fifty thousand dollar sixty thousand dollar a year job at a small division one or division two school it's very very very realistic and i feel like and you can maybe speak to this scott those numbers are only going to continue to get higher because of its importance right yeah yeah and so quick sidebar off of your Boyd story. So Boyd was an injured athlete at Nebraska, worked with, he was a pole vaulter, got injured, and so he was just doing some training.

So he actually, there would be some injured football players that came in, and he just started helping them out by training them. Because they didn't want to train the elite guys, right? Well, because you didn't strength train back then. Strength training was not something people did at all. And so a few of these guys start going back, and they're all of a sudden faster and stronger or whatever. And so the offensive coordinator at the time, Tom

Osborne, talked to the head coach, Bob Devaney, and said, hey, listen, this guy, he's a former athlete and he's doing some weight training with these athletes. I think it's going to help him. And so they brought Boyd in and he basically said, you know, I think this will help your athletes, you know, if we lift weights. And Bob Devaney looked at him and he said, okay, we're going to try it. But if one guy gets slower, you're fired.

And that was the attitude back then, you know? So it was like, yeah. Yeah, people used to think that lifting weights would make you slow, make you muscle-bound, you lose all your mobility and flexibility, you just be walking around all blocky all the time. And we, of course, know that not to be true today. I'll just take a break. When we come back, I want to talk about the day-to-day

of what it means to be a strength coach and what it's like to work with sport coaches. If you're interested in improving your weightlifting technique, you can go to flightweightlifting.com to download for free our 54-page Olympic weightlifting training guide. It covers the snatch, the jerk, the clean, all aspects of those lifts from first pull, transition, second pull, the third pull where you're pulling under the bar, etc. We have videos attached to it. We have two weeks worth of programming. It's a fucking awesome, awesome, awesome guide. Go to flightweightlifting.com and check it out. We're back here at NSCA conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Here with Scott.

We want to dig into what it's like to work with sport coaches, but also what the day-to-day is for a strength coach. Could you walk us through? We'll do that first. What's it like the day-to-day a strength coach as high school? Yeah, high school strength coach setting, you know us through, we'll do that first, what's it like day-to-day as strength coach as high school? Yeah, high school strength coach setting, you know, again, you're going to have maybe not as early morning, depends as some college or professional, but you might have a group in the early morning. And again, if you're a PE teacher, then you're going to that other PE position that you have, teaching gym all day or weight training classes what it might be and then again you're gonna have kids back in the afternoon so depending on school

schedules and sports schedules right if you're in season out of season you're probably gonna have certain teams that are in season that you may have to see in the morning lifting, and then those kids are going to be practicing in the afternoon, and then flip-flop, right, out of season. So that's a typical kind of high school setup. Typically, if you look into the college setting, you know, very similar, although college hours tend to be a lot longer. You've got really early mornings.

You're going to have, you know, depending on what sports you work with, some strength coaches may have 12 different teams, 15 teams, depending on the setting. If you're in a place with a lot of resources, maybe you have two or three teams. Maybe you have one team. Again, typically in college, you're going to see some teams from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. before they have class. You're going to have a break. Maybe there'll be some individual athletes that are injured or have school schedules that come throughout the day and then back again the afternoon. You know, it's really, in college, it can be very, and that's just them showing up, right?

I'm not talking about the setup time so you're going to be there at five now to set up when you're going to write your programs when you're going to meet with the sport coaches professional same thing i mean very long hours i think people may think that the professional setting is just super sexy and very cool which i'm it don't get me wrong super cool you're embedded with a professional team but I just spent a day with the Jacksonville Jaguars back in May I showed up at 6 a.m. and those guys hit the ground running they mean you have breakfast but then they're setting up getting ready for groups so organized at that level and and you're on like we're kind of alluded to the sport coaches schedule. And in Jacksonville, all the clocks are set

seven minutes fast because that's the head coach's time. And everybody is on that same time and everything happens on a specific time. So it's at 6.30 and then something's at 7.30. It's actually 6.23. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So you better not, but if you could ever be late, yeah. But it wouldn't be because your clock be late, yeah. Is that a rule set by the coach?

Or is that just something everyone else figured out? The head coach sets it, yeah. Because we're seven minutes faster. You know to set your clock on that time. I want to know the theory on that one. Those guys didn't stop moving from a strength and conditioning coach perspective with their guys set up with their teams till about 1 30 we had lunch and then that afternoon until about 7 30 or 8 at night it was meetings with all the sport coaches position coaches downloading all the data from the GPS and the heart rate and looking at that and plugging that into all the things that they need to do

to look at their systems and where guys are at and how that fits into the practice schedule I mean so super long days and I would say definitely not that high school coaches don't have long days but as you go up this ladder a continuum of higher level athletes your time commitment gets higher but I think all coaches that are doing it too because then if you start averaging it out you're like man well some of these guys probably don't make a dollar an hour right but like we coach because we love coaching and we love working with athletes none of us who are strength coaches and are doing this do it for the money yeah money is a bonus if you get if you get to that level and you get paid, it's great.

But I don't see anybody thinking about it like, what profession could I get into and really make a ton of money? I should be a strength coach. The hours are too long for that. I know, absolutely. What are the general NFL strength coaches making though? I mean, you're still talking six figure salaries.

Plus, you're doing $2,000. Most of them are over $200. But then then- That's a decent chunk. Bonuses. Bonuses based on stuff that might be written into your contract or stuff based on how far you go within the team, within the playoff system. All those things are going to be bonuses.

So it's long hours, but that's a good chunk of money to be a coach. There's only so many people that get those high-level positions, though. How many NFL teams are there? How many NBA teams are there? There's only one strength coach for each team. There's not that many positions available. You got to work your way up through the ranks too. Like you don't just usually just show up and you're the head guy.

You might, like in baseball, you might be a minor league coach or something like that and like work your way up over time. Right. No, that's a great example. So I think like with the growth of the profession, more professional teams are adding assistants. So some NFL teams now have two to three assistants. NBA teams almost. I just saw my buddy who's the past president of the NBA Strength Coach Association.

Almost every team in the NBA now has a head strength coach and an assistant position. Major League Baseball, I just alluded to, basically from the AA level all the way to Major League Baseball now has at least one strength coach. So again, the Major League team might have two. So it's growing. But yeah, generally, it's few and far between where you would be able to make a transition from some sort of private sector setting right into a head position. It's generally you're going to have to climb the ladder, you're going to have to prove yourself from an experience standpoint working with younger developmental athletes that you

can handle working with the highest level athletes. Yeah. So in college and pro settings, are you working with a team of other strength coaches? We're primarily focused on the head coach position, the head strength coach position for these organizations. But it sounds like to me you were with the Jaguars that day. It sounds like there was more than one strength coach. Right, yeah. So the Jaguars have three, one head strength coach, three assistants, and then a couple interns.

So generally, you know, you're looking at five the NCAA division one has a five strength coach rule so you can only have five total and that's you know straight we get it too strong yeah don't want to make them they generally split it up right generally in college one strength coaches for football and those staffs are often different and the rest of the staffs have all the rest of the teams right so yeah basically like you said college is differentiated between football and olympic sports so if you're football side you're only going to have five people if you're olympic sport or less like that five is the max yeah some of them still only have three because we're worrying about it but then and then you have olympic sports

again olympic sports that's where you may have a bigger staff, but you also might have a small staff where you have the 12 teams and whatnot. But Olympic sports staffs, definitely, usually very collaborative. Obviously, you might train volleyball and rowing, and you have tennis, golf, and baseball, and I have lacrosse and hockey,

but we'll all have an opportunity to kind of collaborate work together and do professional development learn from different events or clinics or certifications or whatever we may feel as a staff that we need to improve on or specifically as well right there's hockey specific things that people can go to and baseball specific things and so those those interests may drive where the people need the other additional training as well. So the dynamic with working with high school athletes is very different than working with pro athletes. I did a short single season with Carl Rockies. When I showed up for spring training, there's a head strength coach, there's a minor league coordinator,

and then there's like five or six guys that are going to take all the minor league teams, the individual minor league coaches. And I was one of the minor league coaches. And when we showed up, the head coach was like, hey, these guys don't give a shit about you. They don't give a shit about what you know. They don't care what school you went to. They don't give a shit.

This is like your first day in prison. Like, you better just get respect. If someone pitches you shit, you better, like, stay confident, be unflinching, have your composure, and, you know, pitch them some shit back in a in like a you know backhand a kind of respectful way you're not trying to like start conflict but you better stand up for yourself and you know that probably doesn't happen necessarily at every high school maybe some high schools but not not every high school like getting getting a 14 year old 125

pound wrestler to like follow your program he's just like okay like you're the authority i'll do what you say i have to that's like my whole dynamic but if you walk into the locker room of an nfl team and some dude is 330 he's been in the nfl for five years he's a fucking badass and you walk in you're like hey sir you have to do my program he'd be like who the fuck are you get away from me like i'm gonna follow your program like i don't do what you say like i'm a fucking pro right so like from a leadership perspective like how's the dynamic change from from at each level high school college and pro yeah well i mean the first thing that i would say is is it's a cliche that we say a lot in coaching but it's they don't care how

much you know until they know how much you care and obviously high school and college you're going to have more authority ability uh even in college but high school yeah you can you're gonna tell them what to do but the difference is when they actually know that you care about their their ability and they're getting better they're gonna give you ten times more so sure in college you definitely have that authority and you can drop the hammer a little bit more but absolutely you know the other thing that I always say is never trust a skinny chef right and it doesn't mean that you have to be a jacked mofo to come in and just have people look at you like oh man that dude's a badass but you have to walk the walk you have to look the part and you have to be able to gain respect and in that pro

setting you might have to do it a little quicker by really kind of being more helpful than you are hey you got to do that over there because yeah somebody's making that many million dollars they're going to be like yeah no i don't not not if you tell me at the same time doug was coaching the rockies i was helping people get ready for the nfl combine too so on the other side of the spectrum and i saw that exactly because the athletes I had, unlike your minor leaguers, even though some of them were worth millions and they were in single A,

these were all guys that were going in the NFL draft a month or two away from there and they absolutely could not care less. And we did. So I actually have a very good example of that authority because the guy that was coaching was named Luke Richeson. You probably know Luke. He's a strength coach for the,

he was with Jacksonville and now he's been at Denver for a long time. And he's very, very laid back and he's very easy on them. And the guys kind of started slipping and slipping and slipping. And they were taking, they weren't doing a very good job of focusing on their bench press one day. And he kind of lost it and he grabbed them all around.

These are all first round guys, number one overall draft picks, two, three, four. And he grabbed them and he grabbed them all around, these are all first round guys, number one overall draft picks, two, three, four, and he grabbed them, and he lit them up, and he basically explained to them, look, when you don't focus in here, we have accidents. When we have accidents, that costs you one million dollars, and he knew where they were gonna be drafted, roughly, because we had projections, and he was like,

Mike, do you know the difference between being drafted number five and number 12? That's 2.2 million million dollars or whatever the numbers were and he went through them individually and at a much higher tone than I'm doing right now like looking them directly in the eye getting right in their face and explaining to them and that was able to have them be like oh he's just not trying to be authoritative because he's powerful and he wants to control me this is what it literally means to me this is in my best interest

to be able to do that so that was right exactly he was able to incentivize him properly and for the next six weeks They didn't miss anything and the other thing he did it was the first time one of them showed up hungover and like 15 minutes Late it was there's the door. We're done here And the guy was like I'm worth the bubble and he's like yeah great and the rest of these guys are worth a hundred million combined And I don't give a shit about you. Tone set. He didn't throw a big deal. He didn't fuss.

He actually did it less emotionally than I just did. He's like, yeah, that's great. But we started at $8 or whatever. Yeah. Me waiting 10 minutes for you cost that guy $1 million, half a million, $100 million. And now he had let them down, and it cost them money and so incentives is is the right thing to do with those folks and then some of it's too is you're going to learn how you how people are motivated right so you maybe you will have some guys on your team

that need to be motivated a little by you getting in their ass a little bit and that's just how that just drives them better so it's not to say that the professional strength coaches are just totally calm cool and collected hey guys yeah today great you know but they're gonna know as they build those relationships and because we've talked about the level of building relationships how important that is to coaching they're gonna know as they know people from building that relationship how they can motivate them so maybe I do need to yell at you a little bit once in a while yeah kind of get you fired up but I know that if I do that to you you're gonna stop listen to me and then

we're gonna have to talk after and get back to the place so you're a head strength coach now not for a team or sports team specifically what does your role look like now what are you what did what's your service who are you serving out yeah so at the NSC headquarters, we have our own facility. The athletes I train now are actually a lot more high school athletes. So the first four years that I was there, we trained Colorado College hockey, and so I still had that Division I hockey team training them alongside all of my other duties that I do. But now, I gave up two years ago.

I have mostly high school athletes, and I have individual tactical athletes. So I have a couple FBI agents I train, Army guys, a couple guys that were getting ready for Special Forces selection. And really the bigger picture stuff that I do on a regular basis is much more related to coaching coaches. So anything related to strength and conditioning coaches from high school to professional. So I really say that I coach more coaches than I do athletes these days, but on a regular basis high school athletes and some individual tactical athletes are who I train the majority of the time.

If someone's interested in getting, I guess going down this track, where do they start? You know, if I'm like, okay, well, maybe I was thinking personal training or owning a gym, but you know what, this being a part of a sports team sounds amazing, high school, college, or pro, what's my career path for that? Education. The education is going to be the first step. Bachelor's degree and a master's degree. And a master's degree is the new minimum requirement. That's just the way it is. Now, when I got into it, you know, in 2000,

that wasn't the case. I'm actually just finishing this summer my master's degree in Master of Arts in Sport Coaching from the University of Denver. But, like, because I had gained that experience, I was able to kind of do it now at a later time but I tell everybody if you're just starting out this is what you're interested in you're gonna have to do bachelor's degree master's degree

now what about what it's in it depends you probably want some sort of exercise science and one or the other and that's why I don't I don't think you need a bachelor's and a master's both in exercise science if you do do it once, you've got a good amount of experience. And that's why my undergrad degree was physical education, master's degree in sport coaching. So I think you have some leeway. Again, if I didn't do some sort of exercise science or like that related, I think that would have been more important to do that for my master's. But I had the exercise science, anatomy and physiology, biomechanics, kinesiology courses in my undergrad.

I didn't need to hammer it again. And next, obviously, is certification. It's required. Major League Baseball has it written into the collective bargaining agreement. The NBA has it written in the collective bargaining agreement to have the CSCS. College level, Division I through III, all has very different wording, but it's nationally recognized strength and conditioning certification. And then what that actually means is kind of interpreted by the NCAA.

But that's the minimum. And then experience, right? That's just getting in on the ground floor. That's just getting in the door. And now you start at the bottom. Right. And experience. I mean, that's the other big thing. Internships, volunteering. I volunteered

at Dartmouth College with the football team for an entire year before they actually hired me on. Yeah. And then it snowballed and I worked with all those other teams after, but I volunteered for an entire year. You have to do what you got to do to get the experience because you can have a degree in ex-phys and sports sports science, and every certification under the sun, but if you haven't actually coached anybody, you're not going to get a job. My student, who's now the strength coach at Fullerton, Will Otto, has a great story about this. He graduated with his undergrad, got his master's degree, had done a six-week training study for his thesis on looking at the effects of weightlifting versus kettlebell swings for power and strength and development. So a training

study published it, and when he graduated, he was like, in his own words, he's like, I thought I had the pick of the land. I was going to be the strength coach at Michigan or Florida State or wherever I wanted, and he said he applied for 29 strength and conditioning jobs and got exactly one callback and zero jobs. And so he was was like and they all kept saying well you've never actually coached anybody at this level and yeah i had personal trained and i had done this and i had coached these weightlifters you've never actually been a college strength coach you can't get it and so i would actually love to know doug how you got in with the rockies but well as to finish up this story the point is Scott how you get in these jobs is

you have to knock down these doors of volunteering it and find a place and continue to show up and you and I'm sure you do have some resources for people but how did you get in with the Rockies I just applied but but yeah like you're like your student or your friend there I applied to like 20 teams now like I called back by like three and I just happened to be lucky enough to get hired by the Rockies. I'm not sure what their rationale was for hiring me, but yeah. The dead looks. Those eyes.

Those creamy eyes. The biopic I sent. Yeah. Shirtless? Shirtless wasn't it. Yeah, I was surrounded by women too. Well, I think too, like I was just saying about the master's degree, like a lot, if you're playing at a Division I university

or a professional team and you don't have a master's degree yet like you're not getting past the hr person they're looking at this thing and they're checking the boxes and they're going okay we have master's degree preferred cscs whatever if you don't have a master's degree that you're getting thrown into the pile that's not making it to the strength coach. And the other thing, it's not who you know, but if you have people that know you that you've done a good job for and you kick ass at that job in the Rockies, your supervisor is going to call somebody when you apply for another job and they're going to say, hey, Scott, I know you have a job open.

This guy is really great. He did a fantastic job for me. And that's gonna help big time because of what you did. I don't imagine anyone that's getting like the big league strength coach position or like the head strength coach position for an NFL team is like totally un-networked. Nobody knew who he was.

He just sent in his resume and they hired him because they didn't have anybody else applying. Right, right. You wanna get that internship. You gotta know people. Right, and that's the huge benefit, right, to coming to the events like this. And any clinic or conference is building your network, connecting with other professionals. It doesn't have to be in the same sport.

I mean, if it's a sport that you want to be in, obviously you have to start networking in that area too. Like if I wanted to get into football, I could be networking better with football or going to more football-specific conferences, which they have tons of. Yep. And just continuing to reach out to people. I think that's the other thing that people don't realize, you know, that you can, that you need to follow up with people, right? So if I meet you guys at this thing and it's my first impression, I'm a young person like i'm not i'm not gonna try and talk your ear off for the hour that you may be you're obviously a busy person but i'm gonna give you a business card or ask you if i can i give you my resume or you know hey i really like that episode that you guys did on this uh could i ask you some

questions about it a later time i'm gonna set up another time that I can connect with you down the road via email or whatever it is. And obviously, as we all know, social media has grown so huge and I've connected with so many, even like other higher level coaches that I never had known before, but we were able to connect via social media. Now I've met them in person and had them speak at conferences and we've had relationships and that never would have happened without social media. And I give kudos to some of these younger coaches who are smart about it. I think you've talked about maybe not some people are not smart about it, but reaching out on social media and saying,

hey, coach, I saw your presentation on this. I just thought you did a really good job, or asking a question, not like, hey, bro, can you send me that program on yeah whatever yeah so you sent me the carolina panthers training program from last year you never met me cool thanks yeah right being sensible about it i mean that's the thing that i do love about strength the initiating profession is everybody that i've met is so willing to share their information even the top guys the nfl guys, the Major League Baseball guys, they're usually very, very approachable

if you do it properly. Right. And you'd be surprised. Some people tend to think that all these guys must get a thousand emails a day. A lot of times

they don't have a lot of people asking them to intern. So if you do it right and if you're persistent, you'd be surprised what you'd get if you just ask.

Yep. If you ask properly. Buy a pick, no shirt, good to go. Yep, exactly. When all else fails. That's right. Scott, thanks for joining us today. I really enjoyed learning about what the difference was between high school and just college in

general. Thanks a lot. I thought it was really important to note that a lot of times we downplay on the show the importance of going to college. A lot of people are trying to get away from traditional education. It's expensive, it takes four years. Just train yourself, train a lot of people. Just always go to conferences, workshops.

Take someone to lunch, ask them questions, read a lot of books, just self-education constantly. But there still are people out there, pro sports teams aren't gonna look at you if you don't have a bachelor's or a master's. So there's still some value on paper of having those degrees in addition to the education that you obviously get in the a bachelor's or a master's. So there's still some value on paper of having those degrees in addition to the education that you obviously get in the process.

Yeah, I think the missing connection there, Doug, and that's a really good point because me being in academia, I'm on the other side of this argument a lot. And it's not that it's a value issue, but it is a credential issue, right? So in other words, you can think it's valuable or not, but the fact of the matter is can you succeed as a strength coach without a college degree? Absolutely. But if you want to be an NFL strength coach, as a strength coach without a college degree? Absolutely.

But if you want to be an NFL strength coach, you're just not going to get in the door. So that's the real conversation where I think we missed. So I thought it was actually very valuable about how you talk about the importance of getting internships and spending that year not getting paid. You probably have to do two or three internships for a bunch of different places if you want to get there. So actually on that note, do you know of any resources where people can go to find internships or like, is there anything like that available? For sure. I mean, obviously the NSCA job board has a ton of opportunities. People are always posting that. That's actually where I got the call. I rocked this thing. You lied. You held out on this. That's what I asked you. You didn't tell me. I actually forgot what you said.

I was like, oh, yeah, the job board. Yeah. There's a website called Football Scoop. If people are interested in football, they put up a lot of stuff. The NCAA, their website has a job board on it. All jobs that would go within the NCAA get posted on that job. Most college strength and conditioning programs now have a Facebook page. Those guys are always posting stuff. The NSCA has a college SIG special interest group where people will post internships in there and a high

school special interest group as well. People can join those and just become part of our network and community. Do you know any NFL or professional strength coaches that are active on social media that are good to follow? I mean, I know Joe Ken's on there a little bit, right? Joe Ken is a huge presence from the NFL side. There's another guy, Jay Agbao, who's actually in Toronto now with the Argonauts Canadian Football League. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's a number of people.

You can just kind of get on there and see who they're retweeting or talking to and look at their follower list and then say, well, maybe I should follow some of these people. But Joe Ken is my guy, so I got to mention him or else he'll probably give me shit at some point down the road about not mentioning. Well, you also have a podcast. You're running the NSCA podcast. We just started the NSCA coaching podcast. So I'm trying to interview strength and conditioning coaches. And we really are just talking about about for lack of a better term the art of coaching I don't talk about sets and reps or anything like that it's about what you're doing in your coaching setting what drives you what you know

how you motivate people how you get their different suggestions that you might have for people to avoid roadblocks or get involved in the profession so that's very new and again it's been really fun to just do that be inspired by great podcasters like you guys you got somebody a job with that right yeah great story so the guy that I just mentioned in Toronto he had been on the podcast in January episode aired a couple months later and some of the coaching staff from the Toronto Argonauts heard the podcast, contacted him after hearing it, and then he ended up with a job interview and is now the strength coach for the Toronto Argonauts. He said never would

have happened if those guys hadn't heard that podcast and heard that he was looking for a job and heard what he was all about through that podcast. So super cool. And Doug and I were on the show, so if you want to hear our thoughts. Yeah, and you guys are going to be on ours, so when that episode comes out, be sure to put that. What do I search for if I'm in iTunes? It should just be NSCA Coaching Podcast.

Awesome. Cool. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks. Thanks, guys. Thanks a lot.