At Mississippi State our main objective within our strength and conditioning program is to give everything we have daily to better prepare our football players in all aspects of the program. Within a year there are many moving parts that we follow and push to get our team ready. I am fortunate to have a great Head Coach, strength staff and assistant football coaches that fully support us and an equally supportive administration. As I move forward I will explain our philosophy, what we expect daily as our standards and how we execute our plan.
First and foremost we are a high energy program, we want to constantly stimulate and motivate our players, which emphasizes five attributes as the foundation of our program:
· Attitude = high juice(energy), being coachable, we say “attitude” is the only disability in life
· Effort = single most important aspect of our program, not a talent issue
· Accountability = held to high standards with consequences (good and bad)
· Toughness = Heart and Soul of the program (Physical and Mental), doing things right all the time
· Performance = Improvement, competitive results, subjective and objective
Everything we do is evaluated daily: how we coach, repetition technique and the foundation that makes up our program. With that we put a lot of pressure on our players to take ownership in the total program. We constantly tell our players “produce daily with the end result in mind”. We demand our players to evaluate themselves and ask themselves the following questions daily:
· Identify your weaknesses, make them stronger
· Embrace the process, take the coaching and get help
· Exhaust all resources provided to you
· Be coachable / don’t train in survival mode
· Enhance your strengths
· Have a daily plan of attack in all you do
· Be willing and forth coming to improve
· Make the sacrifices to be the best
· Have great determination for improvement
· Stay disciplined
· Give everything you have to up your value to the TEAM
We make sure our players understand that they will be coached very hard. Our players must make a decision each workout, fight or flight. At times in each workout the players are pushed to a limit that some feel they might not be able to push through and we want more. We coach them to drive through that really hard rep or set. To us those are the reps and sets that separate the athletes’ development, physically and mentally. It is basically like backing them in the corner and making them fight their way out. Who will be the ones to “fight” or “flight”? Players who have a high expectation for themselves are the players who thrive in our program. Players that take longer to understand confidence and high expectations needed for success usually take a little more time to mold and develop. We promote an atmosphere of contagious energy and contagious work toughness, while doing things under control with a great attitude.
Our strength program is one that is actually very simple. We focus on strength, power and explosive development while taking a total body comprehensive approach that doesn’t over emphasize or underemphasize any specific part of the body. We use progressive overload with a big emphasis on repetition execution.
We like to keep things fresh with consistency. We typically train our team in 3-5 groups per day. We usually will have between 15 to 28 players per group, this way we know we can “hands-on” train our players the best way possible. Typically we will have 5-6 players with each one of our full time strength coaches. This ensures that we can individualize exercises and train our players hard. We emphasize Friday’s as “THE BEST FRIDAY’S IN FOOTBALL” where we train the entire team, offense/defense or position groups. On those days we really put the pressure on the players to lead, coach and push what they are taught daily. To us it is the total package of training both mentally and physically.
EXERCISE CHOICE
We prescribe exercises in our program that are easy to perform and easy to track progress. We want our players to perform each exercise at the highest level each rep. We do certain exercises consistently all year to keep great progress records. We use percentages to help guide our players on the weights to use. However, we really coach each set separately through the percentages because percentages are not in any way exact. Each Strength Coach must see each set to make sure the weight is correct for that day. As the sets move forward the coaches are allowed to bump the last set or decrease the last set as needed. At the end of the group or day we meet as a staff to ensure we are eliminating any error in the progression.
Competition
You must be competitive by nature to have success in anything. We make sure we nurture that competitive drive daily in our program. You only have at most 15 opportunities (games) where there is a real outcome to what we do (win or lose). We coach our players daily that “average” is not acceptable, that you have to fight every day to win to have great results on the field and in life after football. So we make sure everyday something is highly competitive. We have our players vote for 10 leadership committee members the first week of school in the winter. The next week we have a draft for teams. The leadership members are given a draft sheet one week prior so they can study their picks, again we want to give as much ownership as possible. The draft sheet has many variables on it that can help or hinder where a player is drafted (accountability history, attitude history, performance history, etc).
Once the draft is complete and the teams are chosen, its game on. We keep daily and weekly points on what is earned or deducted from each team. For example we score: daily attitude - effort, speed school, strength exercise, agilities drills, Best Friday’s in football workouts, community service and any accountability issues. All this is scored on a specific point system that encompasses the entire football program (academics, weight room, nutrition, training room, equipment room, etc)
There is always a winner and a loser. We do everything we can to stimulate and motivate our players to be the best on and off the field. We believe there is a huge carry over to success in both.
THE END RESULT
When a group comes together (players, coaches, staff, administration, community, University) with one common goal to attack every day to be the best, the results are not by accident. We have a common philosophy/standards in our program: to be the best you can be, give relentless effort, do everything with a passion and reach your potential every day. On and off the field, if you do that the results will be there. We always tell our players that there is a direct correlation between success in the classroom and on field success. That’s why it is no coincidence that we had our best football season ever and we also had the highest team GPA ever. HAIL STATE!