How Kentucky football plans to use new $3 million weight room to spark program
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- Kentucky trustees approved a $3 million renovation of the Joe Craft Football weight room.
- New equipment includes Kaiser a400 machines and Perch cameras for biomechanical data.
- Players will be assigned to four groups for portions of the summer conditioning program.
It did not take long for Will Stein to identify the first facility improvement he would push for after being hired as Kentucky’s football coach in December.
The Joe Craft Football Training Center would turn 10 years old before his first game as coach, and the 15,000-square-foot weight room inside was in need of a face lift, Stein believed. Kentucky players completed winter workouts and spring practice with the facility as is, but by the time players return to campus in June the weight room will look vastly different.
“The biggest thing was, there was some wasted space and training philosophies that didn’t necessarily match with our training style,” Brandon Roberts, UK’s new director of football sports performance, told the Herald-Leader in a one-on-one interview Tuesday. “We wanted to open the room up. We have this massive room down there that felt boxed in with the walls of dumbbells on each side.”
At its April meeting, the UK Board of Trustees approved a $3 million renovation to the weight room.
New energy-absorbing flooring has already been installed throughout. One side of the room is now dedicated to upper-body machines. The other side is filled with lower-body machines. Weight racks are in the middle.
Since the facility opened in 2016, UK has renovated its indoor practice field, so Roberts and the rest of the new staff felt the need to keep an artificial turf space in the weight room had been eliminated. Now, the strength staff will simply walk outside the wall of glass doors lining the weight room to the outdoor turf field for conditioning drills when the weather is good. During the winter or on rainy days, that work will be done in the Nutter Field House.
“I think that is really going to be a big difference for us going into this next season, our strength and conditioning and pairing that with great nutrition and in the training room just being really more aligned in that aspect of our program,” Stein said in January. “It will be huge in working along with sports science to make sure these guys are at their very best.”
The new weight-room equipment follows Stein’s directive that Kentucky turns into a “high-tech program.”
Kaiser a400 machines can track power, velocity and range of motion. Perch cameras will provide biomechanical analysis of players’ performance on weight racks.
With that data, Roberts plans to construct a profile for each player that will closely resemble the player attributes on video games like Madden and EA Sports College Football.
“We can measure just about anything nowadays,” Roberts said. “We almost get too much information, because then you start to second guess yourself. It’s like coaching on the sideline, the analytics bit. Sometimes you’ve got to have the feel for the game.
“Same with us. You gotta have the feel for the game, but you still need all the information.”
Based on individual needs, players will be assigned to four different groups for portions of the summer conditioning program that focus on areas of improvement highlighted by the data.
Stein’s emphasis on competition in every drill during spring practice will carry over to the weight room, too. Monitors in the facility will display the top five and bottom five players in power output and velocity each day.
“They’ve done a phenomenal job with helping me learn new things about my body,” running back C.J. Baxter, who transferred from Texas in January, said during spring practice. “They’re very science based, and the tests that I’ve done in these first four months here, I didn’t really get to experience in Austin. So, it’s been amazing.”
Roberts first met Stein as an associate strength coach at Louisville in 2010. Stein was a walk-on quarterback for the Cardinals who would eventually win the starting job.
When Louisville coach Charlie Strong left for a job at Texas, Roberts followed. Stein joined the Texas staff in 2015 as a quality control coach.
Their career paths split after Texas fired Strong in 2016, but Stein and Roberts remained close. Roberts spent the past nine years at South Florida, first as Strong’s associate head strength coach and later as the school’s assistant athletic director for Olympic sports performance.
“I always say there’s three things that could pull me out of (South Florida),” Roberts said. “It’s (Stein), one of my other good friends or the Powerball.”
Recent rule changes have allowed position coaches to spend more time with players during the offseason, but the strength and conditioning staff still directs the majority of work outside the season and spring practice. That means Roberts played an essential part in helping build the culture Stein wants to establish.
To establish trust with his new players, Roberts took a lesson from Urban Meyer, his former boss at Florida, in spending as much time as possible around the facility. He is planning sessions this summer called “strength schools” in which he will offer players the chance to learn as much as they want about the metrics the new equipment will track and the reasons the staff has designed offseason workout plans the way it did.
Roberts stresses adaptability in tailoring workouts to individual needs. So even though Roberts’ program does not use traditional Olympic-style weightlifting, he is open to using those strategies if a player is not responding to the drills he normally uses.
But regardless of how many fancy machines the weight room includes or how personalized Kentucky’s new conditioning program will be, Roberts knows one element in training remains unchanged.
“The most important part is intent,” he said. “It’s effort and intent. … If you’re not a guy that loves the weight room, I always ask, ‘How do you fall asleep?’ You pretend to be asleep. That’s how you fall asleep. It’s the easiest thing, you pretend.
“So between that locker room and that doorway there, you pretend that you love this room for the next 45 minutes to an hour and a half, or however long we’re in that day, and then I promise you’re gonna have better results.”