Just Your Average Forrest Gump
It seems more and more often I’m writing about my journey and not the science, but I think there’s a lot of value in the process and want to pass along the knowledge from the mistakes I’ve made. It’s been a super interesting decade or so. I’ve been fortunate to be around some pretty awesome people and situations, and some not so great situations and people. On the positive side I’ve worked with Olympians who won their first gold medal in 20 years, I’ve seen the athletes I work with become all stars, win Stanley Cups/Super Bowls/World Series/World Championships/etc, I’ve seen guys I’ve known since they were kids sign multi-million dollar deals, and I’ve been able to see kids realize their dream of playing DI NCAA athletics. I’ve seen former interns go on to do great things in this field, and I’ve seen former kids I’ve coached go on to be mothers and fathers. I even got to be around the Women’s National Program as they fought for better pay and amenities, and they won! I even made the not top ten on Sports Center back in 2010 while on the sidelines of a Friday night USF Football game. I don’t know that that’s a positive in all honesty, but it was an experience to say the least.
On the negative side I’ve seen the absolute worst in people. I’ve seen physical assault of players happen, I’ve witnessed coaches physically fight each other, I’ve been around sexual abuse cover ups (not involved but I was unfortunate to be around one), I’ve been around national doping scandals and I’ve seen kids get injured by coaches using them to try to push their own name. I’ve been manipulated by general managers, I’ve been fired for things I had no control over, I’ve been owed money by facility owners with zero recourse to get it from them, and I was even a week away from being homeless at one point because of it. We’re gonna talk about some of the good, and a lot of the bad/interesting this week and how one seemingly mundane decision can take you to some wild places.
My Time with USF Football
I spent a good amount of time with the University of South Florida’s football team between 2009 and 2011 with both the sports medicine and strength and conditioning staff. USF Football was my second-ever clinical rotation in the Athletic Training Education Program in 2009, and I even decided to do extra and intern with the strength and conditioning staff through 2010 into 2011 to prepare myself for the other side of what would inevitably be my career. I got to be a part of a team that went into a Thursday night ESPN Prime Time game undefeated playing against another undefeated team in Cincinnati that would put the winner on a fast track to a BCS berth and possibly a National Championship game berth. Cincinnati went on to win that game and ended up going undefeated before losing to UF in the Sugar Bowl after Coach Brian Kelly left early to join Notre Dame’s coaching staff. I got to be on staff for two bowl wins, and two top 25 finishes. I was also unfortunate enough to be around for the transition from the Jim Leavitt era to the Skip Holtz era. It was a really interesting time in USF’s athletics history. We had a coach (and most of the staff) who had been around since the program’s inception that were all cast aside when Leavitt was terminated for physically assaulting a player in the locker room (allegedly). It was a weird time, and the transition wasn’t exactly seamless.
When this kind of thing happens you typically see the strength and conditioning staff gutted. But the coaching change happened so late that USF wasn’t able to get the funds together to bring in Golden (Skip’s strength coach at ECU) so there was somewhat of a divided staff. Ronnie Mac was the head strength and conditioning coach from day 1 at USF. He was used to doing things one way and that way wasn’t exactly in step with NCAA policy (Leavitt had a big hand in this) so when Skip came in there was a bit of a panic. You see, Leavitt made the “optional” summer training period mandatory while he was there. This isn’t much different than most programs as the guys who are there know that it’s only optional if you wanna lose your scholarship/get cut. But there’s a two-week period at the end of the school year where the weight room is open for athletes, but you cannot force them to train during that time. It’s right at the end of spring football and right around finals so the athletes are allowed to heal and focus on finals, and rightfully so. Well, under Leavitt this period was also part of that “mandatory but not mandatory” 8 weeks during the summer which made it 10 weeks. Skip came in and wanted to do everything by the book, so the strength and conditioning staff “lost” those two extra weeks with the players. This actually put a lot of pressure on the head strength coach who tried to cram 10 weeks of training into 8. Guys were so blown out and overtrained by the end of the summer that training camp over in Vero Beach was a disaster. I remember Skip Holtz losing his shit during an inter-squad game when guys were blowing assignments and dropping balls. He turned to Coach Mac and said “How the fuck are we THIS out of shape?!?!?!” Well, the writing was on the wall, and at the end of the season, everyone was moving on to other positions. Coach Ronnie Mac ended up at Tennessee, Coach Frank Wintrich ended up at North Texas, GA Coach Mark Hickok ended up at Vermont, and Coach Justin Theil ended up at Army. There was a new era of USF Football, and I think it was one that everyone would like to forget as we went from an 8-4 team to a 2-10 team by the end of it all. We went from consistently playing in and winning bowl games to not even sniffing bowl eligibility.
So what caused this shift? Well, during a game in November of 2009, there was an incident in the locker room at halftime. USF was playing against Louisville on November 21, 2009, and had a great first quarter leading 14-0 by the end of it. The second quarter was all Louisville and they even managed to score two touchdowns over the course of a minute and a half to take the lead near the end of the half. One of those two touchdowns was a 60-yard punt return and Leavitt was pissed, to say the least. I mean, who gives up punt return TDs? NOBODY. USF managed to score a field goal in the winding seconds of the half to retake the lead but the damage had been done.
I was an athletic training student intern with the football team, and I was a junior at that. We didn’t get much responsibility outside of making sure the waters were full and restocking tape in the trunks typically at half time, but this half time I was sent into the locker room to go grab more power flex tape and mouth guards for the trunk on the field. I sprinted to the locker room to get what we needed and was greeted by the medical and athletic training staff when I came in through the door to the training room that was attached to the locker room. They all gave me that “don’t make a f*cking sound” kind of look so I made sure I didn’t make a sound. There was typically a lot of shouting from Leavitt, the man was actually typically really good at “motivating” the athletes but this sounded different. It wasn’t just Leavitt yelling, there were players yelling as well, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see Coach Leavitt holding a player by the collar of his jersey with a few players surrounding Leavitt. I wouldn’t have thought much of it but I was a pretty a pretty nosy dude back in the day so I kept all of that in my peripheral vision. What happened next was actually pretty funny in the moment: Leavitt started grabbing the players surround him’s face masks and started head-butting them (with their helmets on). I don’t remember how many I just remember it seemed to go on for a few long seconds. A few coaches/players came in the broke up the situation and everything seemed to settle down. I got back onto the field to put the mouthguards and power flex tape in the sideline trunk and didn’t say much about it. When the team came out onto the field, Leavitt had blood running all down his face, he had split his nose open. The announcers on TV apparently said it was from him banging his head on the lockers in the locker room trying to pump up the team. I didn’t really think a whole lot about it until the next few weeks.
Apparently what I had missed in the locker room was Jim Leavitt allegedly slapping that player. His name was Joel Miller and in the papers over the next few months, it became apparent that Leavitt had probably slapped Joel after a blown coverage in that 60-yard punt return touchdown. Joel was a non-scholly walk-on player, missed his assignment and Leavitt wanted to make an example out of him by calling him out. If you’ve ever met Joel you’d know that the kid wasn’t going to take his being singled out lying down and he apparently mouthed off to Leavitt. Leavitt allegedly grabbed him and slapped him and when he did some of the nearby players in the locker room surrounded Leavitt. That’s when Leavitt started head-butting the players that the media covered as “pumping the team up.” The funny thing is that it wasn’t Joel that went to the media and the university, it was another player who didn’t like Leavitt and wanted to see him gone. Joel denied the allegations for a good portion of his life before he eventually died of an overdose from the drugs he was using to cope with the fallout from the situation. Leavitt was eventually bought out and let go which brought in the last decade of mediocrity seen by the South Florida Bulls football program. It’s a really sad situation, I can remember interviews that Joel did stating how hard it was to find work because everyone blamed him for Leavitt’s departure and the subsequent falling from prominence (if you can call it that, in my opinion, it was more relevance than prominence). They’d see his name and bring up the situation and he just wanted to move past it. It’s sad that this situation led him to his end, and everyone who blamed Joel honestly should be ashamed of themselves. This kid didn’t need to lose his life because we’re upset about a football team. But that’s life and people can be terrible.
The Not Top Ten
Another pretty interesting thing happened to me while I was at USF and that was making the Not Top Ten on Sports Center. I can’t remember what number I was in the countdown and it was only for one week, but we played a Friday night game against Cincinnati on ESPN my senior year and I got caught up in getting completely run over on the sidelines. USF played A LOT of off-night games, and to our own demise a lot of the time. I don’t know that we won a single Thursday night game in my time there, but we played at least a few every year. This was really the only way we tended to get on TV in prime slots since we were in the Big Least. The Big East was really the red-headed stepchild of the BCS auto-bid conferences at the time and getting on TV at good times wasn’t an easy task. So the athletic director at the time took full advantage of playing on these off nights. Whether it was a Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday we ALWAYS had at least 2-3 off-night games per year. To my knowledge for a solid decade, we NEVER won on Thursday nights, like ever. We always dreaded seeing Rutgers or Cincinnati on a Thursday because we knew we’d have our work cut out for us because those two teams on that night never ended well for us. Any other day of the week and we’d contend with and beat teams like FSU (at FSU), Notre Dame (at Notre Dame), West Virginia (at West Virginia), etc. But on Thursday nights, well we didn’t much like Thursday nights.
Back to the story at hand though. We were playing Cincinnati on a Friday night at Raymond James Stadium. It was sometime in the second quarter and I was on sideline water bottle duty. Our job was to stand there with water bottles and sprint onto the field when a time-out was called or in between quarters to allow the players a chance to hydrate. Well I’m 5 foot 5 on a good day, and the average football player is a lot taller than I am so I tended to drift back off the sidelines and wait for my cue to run out on the field. I was probably three people deep from the sidelines and I typically got relegated to watching the game on the Jumbotron which I was fine with. Well, all I can really remember was watching the play and thinking to myself “Wow that looks like it’s right in front of us” and by the time I looked up the players had all jumped out of the way and I was staring at two giant football players about three feet in front of me. It was like the parting of the Red Sea, it was just me and these two players sliding at what seemed like 500mph towards me. I did my best to jump over them but I got just high enough off the ground for them to clip my feet. I did almost a front flip landed on my face and it looked like a water bottle bomb had gone off. We carried 6 bottles in our holders, and they ALL went flying as I was floating in the air going face-first into the ground. The next thing I remember was a player grabbing me by the waistband of my pants with one arm and pulling me off the ground. Within about 3 seconds the players had put all the bottles back in the holder and one of them was dusting me off. It was like it never happened, in all honesty, it was kind of amazing how quickly the players came to my aid.
But the damage was done and I was run over by two grown men in front of a stadium that holds roughly 72,000 people and a viewership that was nearly 3/4 of a million people. The game was also played on ESPN so if it was a slow week there was a solid chance that it would end up where it did, which was the Not Top Ten. Although it was relatively embarrassing at the time, it’s kind of cool to think about. I’m not positive that there are many strength and conditioning coaches who can say they’ve received that honor, but here I am.
Al Jazeera Investigates: The Dark Side
From 2009 to 2011 I interned at a facility that at the time was called The Athletes Compound and it was located inside of Saddlebrook Resort in Wesley Chapel, FL. The director’s name was Jason Riley and funny enough, Jason was one of my strength coaches when I spent a little bit of time down at IMG playing hockey in the early 2000’s. The original staff at IMG was something to behold, there were some monsters on staff in the beginning. Pete Bommarito, Mark Verstegen, and Jason Riley all came out of this program in the early 2000’s and all went on the completely change the industry. Mark Verstegen started a company called API that has since morphed into EXOS and is a publicly traded sports performance and corporate wellness company. Pete Bommarito went on to create Bommarito Performance Systems and the guy is hands down the best NFL Offseason and Combine Prep coach in the country. He’s one of the few guys in the industry who understand a conjugate template and how to incorporate it into physical preparation for sport. He works hand in hand with Drew Rosenhaus (or at least he used to) to produce some of the best NFL Combine numbers in the country every single year. Jason Riley left IMG along with a few agents who went on to Creative Artist Agency (CAA) and started The Athletes Compound which was located inside of Saddlebrook Resort. It was a destination training facility where the athletes could stay on campus, train, and be fed while training for their upcoming seasons or their Combine/Pro Day. The only other destination facility in the country was in Arizona and was started by Mark Verstegen, one of Riley’s coworkers at IMG. Crazy to think that these two guys were absolute pioneers in the industry the way they were, and they created business models where pulling in 500k-1M dollars in the first 6 weeks of the year was the norm between baseball and football.
Back to Jason. Everything I knew about movement I learned from two men: Jason Riley and a guy by the name of Kyle Morgan. They were on the same staff at The Athletes Compound and legit I think every year we had the best movers at the Combine because of it. Jason was in really good with Creative Artist Agency and also a guy by the name of Eugene Parker who you may have heard of as he represented Deion Sanders when he was playing football/baseball. This meant we ended up with some of the top MLB and NFL prospects every single winter. Jason was also credited with reinvigorating Derek Jeter’s career back in the late 2000s, which helped CAA push more athletes our way. There were winters where we had the better part of 40-50 MLB prospects staying and training at our facility. Do you remember when Ryan Howard lost all that weight and became a Subway-sponsored athlete? Yup, that was our facility that helped get him there and Subway had nothing to do with it. In fact, I remember having conversations with him where he said Subway gave him a lifetime free sub card, but if there was a Quiznos in the area he’d rather pay for a sub.
While Jason was an amazing strength and conditioning coach, he had higher aspirations within the field. There are a lot of us strength coaches who are trying to create some kind of revenue stream that doesn’t rely on our coaching throughout the year because there are times of the year when the athletes dry up. They go off to their teams to play and if you don’t have a steady stream of general population clients, you’re not going to be able to pay your bills. Jason’s idea was a sports supplement company called Elementz Nutrition. I don’t know who is paying the hosting fees for it but you can still find their website here, although the LLC has since been dissolved according to the state.
I did HUNDREDS of hours of research for this company. I can remember spending more time looking up studies to justify certain ingredients than I did coaching a lot of the time. The idea was great: create an NSF-certified line of supplements specifically for athletes. Nobody was doing it at the time because it’s a fairly niche market. 99% of supplements are marketed to the general population and a lot of them aren’t typically even appropriate for someone who is getting tested or cares about what they put in their bodies. Jason wanted to fill that small but potentially profitable hole in the market.
To get this off the ground he needed an investor because most strength coaches get paid poverty wages. He found a man by the name of Charlie Sly, whom he was introduced to by one of his clients. I met him a few times because he was constantly stopping by and meeting with some of the players at our facility and he and Jason would meet often, and I assume talk about the company and strategize. I sat in on some of these meetings trying to give my two cents about including glycerol in the preworkout formula, or bovine colostrum in the postworkout one. I’ve included a video of the documentary here in this article, but to my knowledge, Jason didn’t really know what Sly was doing behind the scenes with some of our athletes.
One of the athletes in the documentary was a guy we had from NFL Combine prep the year prior. His name was Dustin Keller. Dustin was the athlete who first introduced Riley to Sly, and had a hell of a Combine the year before. Dustin took off for the NFL Combine looking like one of those old Under Armour manikins and had a hell of a showing. Someone even has a video somewhere of him doing Nordic Hamstring Curls holding onto a 50lb dumbbell talking about what he was going to do at the NFL Combine. It was wild how in shape he was when he finished up with us.
This documentary came out and the New York Times started implicating a lot of the athletes we worked with (some were mentioned in the documentary, some not) and then traced it all back to Jason. I had left The Athletes Compound about 7 months prior to the documentary coming out, but I still remember walking into the Performance Compound (different facility) early in the morning to work with our Combine Guys and one of the other coaches showing this article to me. The funny thing was when Jason left the Athletes Compound, he actually started the Performance Compound with a few business partners, and after I left the Athletes Compound the facility rebranded. Most of the information about Jason on the internet has him working at The Performance Compound, my new facility. This meant we were flooded with calls from various news agencies for the next few weeks about Jason’s possible role in the steroid ring. We all kind of had to distance ourselves from what happened in the moment, but in my opinion, all this was unwarranted.
In my opinion, Jason was always a by-the-book kind of guy, and I think he was wrongly tied to this issue. He didn’t deserve to have his life ruined because the New York Times decided to run an article calling him the common thread in this whole thing. The NTY even implicated Derek Jeter and Peyton Manning in all of this. The media is awful and if given the chance they’ll ruin your life for clicks. Jason now runs his own facility in Sarasota and from what I understand is doing pretty well. He deserves it.
Bad Coaches
Fast forward about 5 years and I’ve settled into yet another facility. This time it was essentially my dream job and I figured I could help grow something from scratch and stick around for a while. But I was wrong.
I was at the largest indoor ice sports facility south of New York State. We had 5 sheets of ice, and a sports performance department that I was running. This job even helped me get my foot in the door with USA Hockey which led to me being on staff for an Olympic Gold Medal and a three year career working with the Women’s programs.
I was pretty happy for the most part but there was one part of my job that made me pull my hair out more than anything else, and that was figure skating. Figure skating departments are weird as they aren’t directly tied into facilities. They usually contract a figure skating group to come in and run things. Most rinks make almost no money on this concept which is absolutely dumbfounding to me. The biggest problem with this concept is that there are too many people making too much money with zero skin in the game and it’s typically to the detriment of the facility. It made it really hard to do what was in the best interest of the business at that point and my department suffered because of it. To say the least, I did not get along with much of the Figure Skating Department.
There was a series of New York Times articles that came out concerning our facility back in 2019. Usually being in the paper is a cool experience, but not this time. I remember getting links pointing to this article blowing up my phone one night in late December of 2019 and thinking to myself “Well good, they’re finally gonna let these assholes go” and it would be easier to grow my department. Well, I was wrong and that’s not what happened at all. Upper management dug their heels in and the coaches released a statement declaring their innocence. And that’s their prerogative.
The allegations were pretty gross and dealt with a 13-year-old girl and a professional figure skater who was coaching her at the time. I’m not gonna get into the details of all of it but you can find them in this article. Now, I’m not at liberty to say whether I believe they were all true, but SafeSport handed out suspensions and probations (that were turned over on appeal, for whatever that’s worth) to various coaches and Pasco County Sheriff’s Department still has an active warrant out for the arrest of the pro figure skater involved in the lewd conduct.
Although I was in no way, shape, or form involved in this situation, it cost me my role with USA Hockey, a good portion of my sanity, and eventually my job. To see how the sausage gets made is stomach-turning at times and I couldn’t be involved in it anymore so I got very loud about it after I walked in on a coach in my gym in the dark with an athlete while under SafeSport investigation (big no-no. Then was eventually let go (which was honestly pretty mutual at the time).
Everything worked out in the end. This all happened right before Covid, and it led me down a path of drinking and self-loathing that almost killed me. But now, I’ve got a family, a beautiful daughter, and a business where I really don’t have to answer to anyone. But given the opportunity, I don’t think I would ever voluntarily put myself through what happened during that time and I hope the young lady involved in this situation has found peace.
The Olympics - A Story of Fate
Back in 2017, the facility I was working at was hosting the USA Hockey Women’s National Team’s residency for the 2018 Olympics. They stayed and trained here for 6 months prior to the 2018 Winter Olympics and for the first two months, I was just kind of around and helping out here and there. The head strength and conditioning coach for this team was a man by the name of Jim Radcliffe. Jimmy is a legend in the field and every single athlete I’ve ever had that came out of his program at Oregon was an amazing mover. Jimmy lives in Oregon, so a lot of the off-ice coaching came from the hockey coaches. Now, this is incredibly weird for something like this to be happening at the highest levels of competition but it definitely happens. Jimmy was programming their work, and the hockey coaches were implementing it. I would come out and help if I was asked but I wasn’t a constant or anything. The girls mostly ran their own warm-ups, their own lifts, and their own movement sessions.
Back in 2017 right before the IIHF World Championships the girls had gone on strike so they could be better taken care of. I remember at the time thinking it seemed dumb and overblown, but them going on strike and winning is ultimately what opened the door for me to work with the team. USA Hockey had to set aside X amount of dollars for their training, and part of that money included paying a coach to be there with them during their residency.
All the stars aligned and they needed someone who could be there to run the day-to-day and boom, I’m the assistant strength and conditioning coach for the Olympic Women’s Hockey Team working under Jim Radcliffe and Vern Gambetta (another legend in the field). We went on to win a Gold Medal in 2018 and that set me up to be on staff for the next two years with the program.
Everything Happens For a Reason
To understand the absurdity of all this I’m going to backtrack a little bit to when I started college. I decided to apply to get into the USF Athletic Training Education Program as opposed to Exercise Science because the application period was sooner than Exercise Science, and I wanted to be done with college sooner. Turns out, it was probably the best decision I ever made.
To even apply to the program you needed 50 observation hours. There was only one place close to where I lived to get those hours in the short three weeks I had to get them, and it was the Athletes Compound. Getting athletic training observation hours under their athletic trainer led me to obtain an internship with Jason (Al Jazeera documentary guy) at the same facility, and that internship was what ultimately got me into the athletic training education program. There were over 150 applicants (they take 30), and that internship made me stand out. My GPA wasn’t even high enough to get in, but that internship pushed me over the edge into the program. In that program, one of my professors was Dr. Barbara Morris. She pushed me past the finish line in more than one way and stood in my corner when the director of the program wanted to kick me out of the program. She was the Director of Sports Medicine for the Hospital involved with the rink, and she strong-armed them into hiring me to run their sports performance department. Running that sports performance department is the only reason I got to work with the Olympic team. Working with the Olympic team is probably the only reason USA Hockey hired me to work with the national program for the next two years. Working with the National Program is ultimately what gave me the backbone it would take to open my own facility. Making that decision to apply to the Athletic Training Education Program at USF got the ball rolling on every single thing (good and bad) that’s happened to me in my career. Crazy to think about. Decisions matter, so make good ones!
Wrapping All This Up
Life is a series of decisions. Now, some of those decisions are mundane like what shirt to wear, or what to eat for breakfast. Some decisions seem much bigger like buying a house, or when to have kids. But some of those seemingly mundane decisions can take you down some weird paths. From being in the Not Top 10 to being implicated in a national pro athlete steroid ring, and even winning an Olympic Gold medal, all these things happened because of one decision that I made because I wanted to be done with college faster. It’s weird to think about.
Now my journey as a strength coach has been an interesting one. I say strength coach and not a person because my career has driven my life decisions for the past 15 years. I’ve met some of the best people on the planet, and some of the worst. I’ve been on cloud nine, and an inch away from being 7 feet under. I’ve worked under and with some great people. I’ve been let go for things out of my control, and on the flip side, I’ve been given positions due mostly to circumstances and not just my abilities. I’ve been in the running for Head Strength and Conditioning Coach positions in the NHL, and I’ve been in a position where I was fighting to keep a job that paid me essentially poverty wages.
All these things happen because we make decisions. Decisions shape our lives. And none of this is to give you anxiety about making decisions or anything like that, I just want to point out how they impact our lives and how something fairly mundane can be pretty impactful. Some of the decisions I’ve made were not good ones, some were. I made the decision to pick up a beer (more like 20) almost every night for the majority of my adult life, but then I finally made the decision to not.
The good (or bad) of your decisions isn’t always clear for a while. Sometimes the decisions you make will put you in a dark place in the short term and come together later, sometimes they’ll seem great in the short term and come back to bite you in the ass later. But take a step back when it’s all said and done then take inventory of everything and learn from the decisions you make. At the end of the day we are all a product of the decisions we make, so try to make well-thought-out ones!
