Strength and conditioning training is now common among almost all sports, but it wasn’t always that way.
Football has long coveted bigger, faster and stronger athletes, but even in that sport there wasn’t an organized offseason strength program until the ‘60s. Nebraska was the first college football program to hire a full-time strength coach when Cornhusker head coach Bob Devaney brought in Boyd Epley, a former ‘Husker pole vaulter, to start Nebraska’s dedicated strength and conditioning workouts in 1969. Epley remained with the Cornhuskers for 40 years, and he began a trend that would not only follow through to every college football team but also to pretty much every other college —as well as high school and pro — sport as well.
Basketball was one of the last sports to embrace strength training, as hoops coaches worried that getting stronger would negatively impact a player’s shot.
“It was a stereotype,” admitted WVU’s Hall of Fame men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins. “When I was playing (in the ‘70s), that was out there.”
During his career as a point guard at West Virginia (1974-77), Huggins became one of the first Mountaineer basketball players to work out with weights.
“When I really started taking it in earnest was when Dr. (Robert) Kurucz (WVU professor in kinesiology) was here,” said Huggins. “I had some classes from Dr. Kurucz, and he did a great job teaching it.”
Basketball was more of finesse game at that point, as even West Virginia’s “big men” Warren Baker and Maurice Robinson weighed just 200 and 215 pound, respectively, during their playing days. Both finished time at WVU with more than 1,300 points and 850 rebounds despite their lack of girth. That’s because their opponents were the same size.
West Virginia’s current men’s team features just three players — Joe Toussaint (190), Kedrian Johnson (185) and Joshiah Davis (195) — whose listed weight is below 200 pounds. On the other end, five Mountaineers top out over 225 pounds, with 6-foot-10, 285-pound Jimmy Bell at the far end of the scale.
It didn’t used to be that way a few decades ago, though.
“Nobody lifted much when Joedy (Gardner) was here (1975-78),” acknowledged Huggins of his former WVU head coach.
Things soon started to change for basketball, though.
When Huggins finished his playing career in 1977, he moved over to coaching. He was a graduate assistant on Gardner’s staff in his first year out of college (1977-78) and then took an assistant coaching job at Ohio State the next year. He spent two seasons with the Buckeyes before getting a head coaching opportunity in 1980 at Walsh College, an NAIA program in Canton, Ohio. After three years leading the Cavaliers (71-26), he was the lead assistant at Central Florida (1983-84) before becoming a Division I head coach at Akron (97-46 from 1984-89). From there, he took over at Cincinnati (399-127 from 1989-2005), had a one-year stint at Kansas State (23-12 in 2006-07) and now is in his 16th season leading his alma mater (336-194 from 2007-present).
Along the way, strength and conditioning became a bigger and bigger part of basketball.
Huggins helped make it that way.
“When I went to Ohio State, people lifted a little bit,” he noted. “Then I went to Walsh, and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh!’ So, we lifted a lot there, and we lifted at Akron, and we lifted a lot at Cincinnati. I think it was at Cincinnati where it really got going.”
By the time Huggins was head coach of the Bearcats, pretty much every college football program had a strength coach, but a full-time basketball strength coach was still a rarity. Huggs wanted someone to oversee that process for the UC basketball team, though.
“I actually called (WVU) and told them I needed a strength coach,” explained Huggins. “I had been the strength coach before, but I wanted someone to do it full time.
“So, I called here, and they told me they had a great guy here in Mickey Moratti. So, I hired Mick, and obviously he has gone on to do great things. He got incredible notoriety for being our basketball strength coach. Of our 13 players, I think at least 11 of them bench pressed over 300 pounds. It was something that had never happened in college basketball before that. Mick, justifiably so, got a lot of credit.
“He moved on (with stints as the director of strength and conditioning for Notre Dame football, 1998-05, and Florida, 2005-11), and is now at Ohio State (as assistant A.D. for football sports performance) and is still there.”
The Mountaineer men’s basketball coaches adopted strength training for their players as well, beginning with Gale Catlett (1979-2002) and on through John Beilein (2003-07). They didn’t have the luxury of being able to use full-time strength coaches for their own teams, though, as they had to reach over and get the football strength coaches to work with their basketball players. Al Johnson and then Mike Barwis oversaw almost all the strength and conditioning work for the entire WVU athletic department, along with assistants like Dave Lawson or Jeff Giosi.
Finally in his second season as West Virginia’s head coach, Huggins was allowed to hire a full-time strength coach for basketball.
He reached out Andy Kettler, a Cincinnati native who had been the head strength coach at Winthrop for the previous two years, and convinced the Cincinnati native to come to WVU for a basketball-only position. Kettler was the energy behind the Mountaineer hoop workouts for a decade before accepting an offer from Chris Mack, his former high school teammate, to come to the University of Louisville. After four seasons with the Cardinals, Kettler returned to his hometown to become the strength coach at Xavier.
To replace Kettler, Huggins hired Shaun Brown, who had worked extensively in college (Minnesota, USC and Virginia) as well as eight years in the NBA with the Boston Celtics (1997-2003) and Toronto Raptors (2003-06). Brown is now in his fifth season as the director of strength and conditioning for Mountaineer basketball.
“I’ve been blessed. The guys I’ve been able to attract here have been great,” stated Huggins. “Now we have Shaun, who is probably – not probably, he is – the best basketball strength coach in the country. He’s done it with several NBA teams, and think about getting those guys to lift, as much as they play and as much as they travel. But they all love him and give him a lot of credit for the things that happened in their careers. I think that bodes well for here in that our guys know he’s dealt with pros.”
West Virginia’s workout facilities have greatly improved over the years. For a long stretch, basketball and most other WVU athletic programs would use the weight room at Mountaineer Field, at least when the football team didn’t occupy it. Then a few weight machines were wedged into a small room in the lower level of the Coliseum. It wasn’t until WVU’s $24.1 million Basketball Practice Facility opened in 2012 that Huggins’ team not only got its own dedicated practice court but its own weight room with the latest strength and training equipment. There is even a turfed conditioning area behind the BPF overlooking the Arboretum.
“I told Shaun when I hired him, ‘You tell me what we need, and I’ll get it.’ When LeBron (James) made the cryo chamber, we bought one. When Deuce (McBride) found a light bed somewhere – I still don’t know where he found it – I told him, ‘You don’t need to be driving after a game out to somewhere else to use a light bed.’ So, we bought a light bed. I think if you look at what we have from a strength and conditioning stand point and a rehabilitation stand point, nobody has what we have.”
The facilities have not only changed greatly, but so has WVU’s commitment to strength and conditioning for all its athletic programs. The $10 million Athletic Performance Center opened in the fall of 2021, giving a workout home to Mountaineer Olympic sports athletes.
West Virginia now employs 12 full-time strength and conditioning coaches, each assigned to different programs. Besides Brown, Mike Joseph is in charge of football, and Kaitlin Sweeney, who along with a staff of four assistants, works with WVU’s Olympic sports teams. The athletic department also has three full-time nutritionists – Haley Bishop, Tori Brown and Lyndsey Eckenrode – who oversee the Mountaineers’ dietary needs.
All these people are part of the process of making West Virginia’s student-athletes bigger, stronger and faster, even for a sport like basketball, which not all that long ago didn’t believe bigger (at least wider) and stronger were necessarily better.
