Strength Coach- Why High Schools Need More Strength & Conditioning Coaches- Part 2

Ryan Faer  

Arizona Performance Coordinator for 

Cleveland Indians Baseball

http://bit.ly/StrengthCoachHS

THE HIGHLIGHTS:

The entire athletic department stands to benefit from hiring a strength and conditioning professional. Aside from enhancing the play on the field, all sport coaches should be glad to have less on their plate once the responsibilities of performance training are taken by the strength coach. In addition, overall care for the athlete is improved through synergy between the Athletic Trainer and the Strength and Conditioning Coach.

Improving the Athletic Department as a Whole

I don't think many people would disagree with the claim that hiring a strength and conditioning professional can significantly improve an athletic department. From a performance standpoint, there are countless ways in which having a true performance coach can help the athletes and their respective sports teams improve their outcomes on the field.

Without delving too deep into the performance factors, let's briefly address a couple potential benefits:

Improved movement quality, proprioception, kinesthetic awareness, and tissue tolerance allow for greater degrees of freedom of movement on the field/court, and a greater ability to withstand these athletic movements, thus reducing the likelihood of injury.

Increased strength, allowing for a greater capacity to produce power, will ultimately lead to an enhanced ability to express other athletic traits.

The two points above are essentially the main goals of the strength and conditioning professional; prevent injuries and enhance performance, in that order. Together, these goals seek to accomplish a much broader mission. Win games.

There are other significant benefits that the athletic department stands to gain, though, which may not come to mind as quickly as performance enhancement and injury prevention.

More Freedom for the Sport Coaches

Most pertinent to sport coaches is the amount of time and effort that will become free for use once a strength and conditioning professional takes over the performance training programs. In the very least, this will give each sport coach 2–4 hours of additional time each week to do what they originally signed up for. This might allow them to be a head/assistant sport coach and in many cases, a teacher. The headache that is associated with the weekly question, “What are we going to do in the gym/weight room?” will vanish.

If, at any given point in the year, just some of your “major sports” (MBB, WBB, Football, BSB, Softball, MSOC, WSOC) are training in the weight room, that gives at least seven coaches a break from trying to design, implement, and coach workouts. Instead, those coaches can spend their time in a more beneficial manner. Time will be used more efficiently, and the sport coaches will be much more content in the long run, even if they don't initially jump at the idea of yielding some of the control over their program. Join StrengthCoach.com to keep reading....