Uplifting experience

Nationally acclaimed strength and conditioning coach Scott Sahli arrived at Burnsville High School in the spring aiming to reignite Blaze athletics.

He started in the classroom, not the weight room, using a PowerPoint presentation rather than power lifts. Students learned the science behind Sahli's methods and their new coach's philosophies.

"He talked about how football is the tip of the iceberg and all the work we put in is what's underneath," senior running back Josh Christoffersen said. The Blaze has gone a combined 7-30 the past four seasons.

"I want to win football games, and it starts in the weight room," Christoffersen said.

The 2011 National Strength and Conditioning Association High School Coach of the Year, Sahli spent 33 years at Northfield and helped build the Raiders football program into a perennial power. With him aboard, Burnsville moves into a privileged minority of schools to have a coach with NSCA credentials planning and supervising workouts.

In recent years, high schools have improved their athletics programs by installing synthetic turf fields or building mammoth fieldhouses. With nationally certified strength and conditioning coaches, schools such as Burnsville, Elk River and Wayzata are leaders in a new form of arms race.

New approaches

Johnson, awarded NSCA Minnesota Coach of the Year honors last year, and his staff have trained thousands of Wayzata athletes through the summer Trojan Power program in the past decade. Not coincidently, several Wayzata programs enjoyed great success during the same period, highlighted by Class 5A state football titles in 2005, 2008 and 2010.

"We train kids to be great athletes," Johnson said. "We want to apply what we do in here to all the sports they are playing. I think that is a newer trend, a more athletic-specific strength and conditioning program as opposed to just a strength and conditioning program. You want to get bigger, faster and stronger but it has to apply to what you're doing."

Sahli concurs. He retooled the Burnsville weight room to better fit his philosophies, installing an additional nine platforms for use with clean and snatch workouts. Those Olympic-based lifts, Sahli said, develop power and explosiveness beneficial in every sport.

Sahli, who helped the Northfield football team to 11 state tournament appearances in 18 seasons and the Raiders weightlifting team to seven consecutive state titles, recalled some the top on-field performers as kids who "weren't maybe the biggest bench pressers but they could all squat 500 and clean 300 [pounds]."

New Elk River football coach Steve Hamilton, a Michigan native with coaching experience in his home state and Georgia, said he is less concerned with players building "beach muscles" as he is developing strong core muscles.

Mike Breyen, a 19-year veteran of the Elks football program who oversees strength and conditioning, has long shared the same vision. His mentors were former Elk River coach and track and field Olympian Colin Anderson and Apple Valley track and field coach Bud Bjornaraa -- a strength and conditioning pioneer in Minnesota high school circles.

Training athletes, Breyen said, is a fluid and ever-changing process. For example, he is now working on the pace of athletes' workouts whether in the weight room or on the track. The goal is matching recovery time between lifts or sprints to game conditions "so the explosiveness is there when they need it."

Building bodies and bonds

Ask Burnsville football players what they are gaining from Sahli's presence and the first words they use are "technique" and confidence." At Wayzata, whether you are a football player or part of the Trojanettes Dance Team, you are in the weight room to grow stronger on and off the field.

"It teaches you life skills, to keep working at your trade and get better every day," Trojans senior basketball player Ben Joppa said. "You can't go through life being the same as you were three years ago."

"When you come in here and see all the athletes working hard, it makes you want to work hard and achieve things," Wayzata senior football player Alex Carlson said.

Said Sahli: "We're trying to build people. The athletic part and winning go hand-in-hand with life."

Sahli gives seminars throughout the country and hears a similar criticism at every stop: Today's athlete does not possess a great work ethic. He sees the issue from a different perspective.

"I think it's a lack of education," he said. "I think if everybody knew what to do and why, they would do it."

Charts laying out goals for athletes to achieve line one wall within Burnsville's weight room. In his experiences at Northfield, Sahli said certain numbers of football players must reach various weight room milestones for the team to achieve success.

The new arms race?

Wayzata activities director Jaime Sherwood said the success of his school's strength and condition program is a product of good timing and better coaching.

The Trojans modeled their programs after Alexandria in the mid-1990s and a confluence of events -- a new Wayzata High School building, a shift toward curriculum-based teaching in the classroom and weight room and staff members with NSCA certification -- gave the Trojans a strong foothold.

With those factors in mind, plus the unique qualifications of a teacher such as Johnson (a physical education/health teacher with NSCA certification), Sherwood stopped short of suggesting more schools would begin to follow suit.

"I think it comes down to the wants and needs of a community and if people want to have high school athletes training in a school setting," Sherwood said.

"In my mind, administrations have been way behind on that," Sahli said. "They key is the person or the staff. Here at Burnsville, all the coaches have come met with me to talk about what we can do in their sport. It's kind of like the cart has been put before the horse. I've seen some of the big fieldhouses and some of the stuff they're doing inside of them makes me go, 'Wow.'"