Episode #50: Matt Durant Webinar (Building Champions On and Off the Field)

Building Champions On and Off the Field with Matt Durant

In this episode of Significant Coaching, Webinar Edition, we sit down with Matt Durant, who has served as the Director of Strength and Conditioning at the University of La Verne for over 22 years. In 2017, Matt was honored as the National Sports Performance Association (NSPA) Coach of the Year, becoming the inaugural recipient of this prestigious award.

Matt’s coaching philosophy centers on relationship building and empowering athletes to exceed their own expectations – in both sports and life. “What I take the most pride in is helping people realize they can achieve more than they thought possible,” he shares.

Join us as Matt offers valuable insights into athlete development at the youth and collegiate levels, highlighting the transformative impact of mentorship and resilience in shaping future champions.

Learn more about Matt Durant here:  https://voice.laverne.edu/2019/matt-durant-heavy-uplift/

Transcript

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Happy New Year, everyone. I hope you all had a happy, healthy and prosperous 2024. I'm ending the first season of the Significant Coaching Podcast with a conversation with one of my longtime friends, Coach Matt Durant, the Director of Strength and Conditioning at the University of La Verne in Southern California. I truly believe that Coach Durant is the best sports performance coach in the business. I'm not alone in this belief because the National Sports Association Performance Association named him their coach of the year back in 2017. And you'll soon hear why. He's beloved by his athletes, and he maximizes their abilities while teaching them how to learn, how to lead, and how to be significant adults in our world. If you're an athlete, parent, or a coach, this episode will educate you and inspire you. Be on the lookout for the season two trailer of the Significant Coaching podcast coming January 2nd. Thank you for all your support this year. I hope you've enjoyed these first 50 conversations as much as I have. Okay, here's my conversation with coach Matt Durant. Welcome everybody to the Significant Coaching Webinar Series. Tonight we're talking strength and conditioning and really excited for our guest who's been a good buddy of mine for, I don't know, 15 years almost, Matt, right? It feels like forever, doesn't it? So we're going to dive in, and a lot of you are here because you have teenage athletes, high school athletes, and you want to figure out how do we best develop them? How do we get them stronger? How do we get them faster? And there's nobody better than Matt. Matt has had a really illustrious career. He is without a doubt, one of the best strength conditioning coaches in all of the United States. At every level and his peers recognized that in 2017, he was named the national strength and conditioning coach of the year, which is unbelievable. And he was recognized the best if you've ever been in Matt's gym. It only takes about 15, 20 minutes to realize why he is so good at what he does. It's dynamic. It's fun. The kids are challenged, they're organized, they're disciplined and any kid that gets quality time with him walks out of that gym, a better athlete and a better person. So coach Durant, so great to have you. Thanks for doing this with me. I appreciate it. And thanks for those kind words. Anything good that has happened to me. It's because of the people that I'm around, the athletes I get to coach, the coaches I get to work with, people like yourself who brought in some great girls who made me look like a really good coach. So It's really about the people that I get to be around. It's mutual. My friend, you made me a lot better coach by my kids being able to work with you every day. So I appreciate it. I'm going to jump into some questions and then parents feel free to get into the chat. And you can send us questions that way as well. Matt, I remember it's gotta be 12, 13 years ago. You had a six or seven year old son who's now a, I can't believe he's a high school junior, senior. My oldest. Yeah. He's 17 now. Yeah. And I can't remember if I was just in the weight room. I don't know who you were working with, but there was a group of kids. I don't know if it was my team or another team in there. And you had your six, seven year old son demonstrate a clean and jerk. I was just blown away on how ripped he was and how strong he was at that age and how disciplined he was. He did it. He did it exactly right. My question for you is how do you tailor when you're looking at whether it's a 7-year-old or a 20-year-old. Football player, a 20 year old swimmer, a 15 year old baseball player. How do you go about tailoring the development of that athlete for individual sports? That is such a great question. Identifying their strengths and their weaknesses and having an understanding of the sport that they want to play or they're currently in and how you can, as a strength coach, impact that in a in a way. So having, Understanding like aquatics athletes versus rotational athletes versus field sport athletes versus court sport athletes, and just having an understanding of what's going on metabolically with the sport and conditioning, kind of conditioning stuff with it. And then also understanding, where the breakdown might be like, for example, I'm just going to throw some examples out here. Aquatics athletes, a lot of them, and I'm going to generalize start at a very young age swimming in the pool. Okay. And then as they get older, they just, as they get older they're so What we call kyphotic, they have a rounded, like rounded shoulders, right? Everything's rotated forward. And so it's just going to strengthen in the back and making sure we're trying to get the body back to some symmetry. And then with different sports, with my volleyball girls that come in, a lot of them come in right out of club season. They've been jumping for almost two years in a row year round. And okay, we're going to stop jumping for a while. We're going to go over landings. We're going to build some strength. We're going to see if there's some asymmetries in the body, right? Discrepancies between their right and their left side, both legs and arms, and then where they're not the strongest so that I can build them up to be indestructible so that they can go out and perform at a really high level at the college level. Let's talk about that symmetry. Cause I think that gets lost sometimes, you talked about a volleyball athlete, especially a hitter. They're. They might swing a hundred times in practice. So they're using that, that right shoulder or that left shoulder over and over again. Same thing with a pitcher, a quarterback. How do you go about. Continue to increase their overall strength, but help them get to that symmetry. It's a great question, coach making sure we're lifting in multiple planes of motion. So not just like a bench press is very sagittal. You push it, you push your arms away from your body. We want to make sure that we're moving in horizontal plane or vertical planes, horizontal planes, and then what we call frontal planes. So out to the side, so that we're three dimensionally looking at the human body. Okay. I've been very blessed at Laverne. I have a lot of tools in my toolbox. We just don't have a barbell. We have dumbbells. We got kettlebells. We got sandbags. We got suspension trainers, things that hang from the ceiling, medicine balls. And so I look at it in terms of what's the best tool for the job for that day with all of my overhead athletes. So anyone that does something where the arm's coming forward, whether that's volleyball or baseball or softball, I want to make sure that we're going almost two to one full to push, really strengthening that posterior chain, working on our core strength and everything that we do trying to be as ground based as we possibly can, where our feet are touching the ground, even though a volleyball player, when they go to hit, they're up off the ground, touching with my baseball players and my softball players. Everything that we do involves one or both feet in the ground at all times, even with our core work trunk work, however you want to put a nomenclature on it. But everything that we do involves connecting my upper and my lower half. Okay, so this last year with volleyball, I can think about two girls right now on the top of my head that got to me and both had some lingering shoulder issues. So the first thing we did, I did as I went back and I said, okay, we're not going to be afraid of this. We're actually going to train us, train them to be indestructible. So teaching them how to brace really hard so that the shoulder isn't the prime mover. Having a better understanding of what the last function is in terms of when we press trying to engage more lat to press overhead and press horizontally so that when we do these things, they know how to develop the tension in their body to brace and stabilize, depending on how heavy the weight is, because that is the goal is to build them up to be really strong. And to do that, they have to be in a place where they understand tension. Not just necessarily squeezing really hard and just holding, if we're going to deadlift a heavy weight, your feet got to be in the ground, they got to set their trunk, their shoulders got to be in a good place, their arms got to be in a good place. We talk a lot about having active hands and active feet, really what we do with our hands and our feet work together to develop the strength. And then someone really smart, much smarter than myself said a great test of strength on someone is their inner abdominal wall strength and their grip strength. If you can't hold it in your hands, your body will probably get into a position that allows you to hold it, which isn't going to be a good position. And if your trunk isn't strong enough to keep you up upright, braced and stable, then it's going to put a lot of pressure in your lower back. So a lot of grip strength, stump, a lot of inner abdominal wall strength, and then just over coaching probably my athletes. I'm sure get tired of hearing me say. Tight butt, tight tummy, active hands, active feet. You and I have talked about this many times and I'm training my daughter with your mentality of how important it is that there's different types of strength development. We're doing that static where we're, we want to isolate a bicep. We want to isolate a quadricep or a hamstring. What is your balance? You talked about a two to one to a pulling. Movement mechanism to a pushing mechanism. What is that same ratio for static to dynamic lifting? Cause you, you do a ton of dynamic work in your gym. Yeah, I it's funny. A number of years ago, I walked into a club volleyball program that they hired me and I looked around and I was working with the 18s, the 18 one team. And I said, wow, those two, I pointed to girls. I go, who are those two? They got the best definition on their legs, the quads and their hamstrings. And they're like, Oh, they're coming off ACLs. And I went, wait, they're coming off ACLs and they look like that. So I started to go back and see what physical therapists were doing and then make that part of our strength training, adding a lot of weight to it. And that's really started me down this path in terms of how we look at developing things. Young people with long femurs. aren't great squatters. Yet we ask them to squat all the time. So how can we do it in such a way to elicit a response that we want out of them? For me, I'm going to go right to, like either a split stance or rear foot elevated, single leg squat stance, maybe holding the weight in front of me, as opposed to putting it around my shoulders, whether it's a front squat or back squat. There's really three places you can hold weight. And I will circle back to answer your question, but it's around my shoulders and at my side. So now if we start to look at, okay, if I want to lunge really heavy to my left on a lateral lunge, first of all, I have to have the required hip mobility and ankle mobility. So I'm going to make sure that my young athletes, and they come in, we start them off very remedial in terms of like just a basic single leg squat. As I have gone through my career, I'm taking things like putting pistol squats in our dynamic warmup outside. Explain what a pistol squat is for those that don't know. Standing on one leg, squatting down, kicking your other leg out and then standing right back up. If they were typing pistol to YouTube or something, an ungodly amount of different pistol squat variations pop up. And so I started putting all that dynamic stuff of full range of motion, moving in that frontal plane. So that side to side and putting it in our dynamic warmup. So we're giving the athlete a minimal dose effect every single day of doing dynamic stuff. Now, if we go into, Olympic lifting, which to me is power based and dynamic. It's using, it's having a really good teaching progression and then making sure that as we are teaching everything, that one thing leads to the next. So we layer our learning. So by the time I get to something, they've had a couple of weeks, if not more than a couple of weeks. And they've been able to work through it. So it looks like we have had a foundation of a year doing something like a hang clean to reverse lunge. Okay. So the training itself will be dynamic in terms of what I asked the athletes to do. And then as we get better at it, I just load them a little differently and make sure that we're keeping everything in a space where And this is where I probably grown as a coach. I give them a lot of room to explore. So I'll coach something and then I will sit back, cue it and watch them coach each other. And it's funny how athlete by college athletes. Have a way of talking to each other where I have actually stepped back and listen to them coach each other and taking their cues, but to get back to your original question, the dynamic stuff, we are dosing it almost every single day in a very controlled arena so that they can get better at it. So when we go to load it with weight. It now moves really well. That's great. What is the result, of that compared to squatting, benching, curling, leg extensions? What's the result that you see from those, that dynamic dosing? So I think this is something we were talking about in my office today is that the first rule of strength and conditioning is injury prevention. We have not had a Volleyball ACL in my 22 years of being at Laverne. I've never had a non contact APM. One in women's basketball, two in softball, one in women's soccer. That means we're staying really healthy. An athlete's best ability is their availability. So if I can keep them healthy or help keep them healthy, keep the tissue quality, good, keep the movement quality, good, theoretically, they should go out to their sports. And be able to perform without having restriction, but that full range of motion really allows us to, when you have an initial, when you get it introduced to an initial weight training program, you have a spike and then you plateau. But if we're trying to get 1 percent better all the time, technique needs to be good. Range of motion needs to be good because inevitably, if you're not coaching it, you're not preaching it. You're not really making it's intense. Athletes will plateau a lot faster and they'll start minimalizing what they're doing. And I think again, over my years of doing this, women listen to what you say, guys, listen to how you say it. And I think that with the females, especially getting them to just be technicians, all of a sudden we see girls doing this. For the four years they're with us at Lavergue. And to me, the most important thing are all American volleyball player I talk about, she's an amazing volleyball player. My Ray, who I just love to death, who all she ever does is smile. When she first got to us, her highest touch was nine, 10. Okay. Now, three years later, she's touching 10 too. Wow. And so that's a big improvement, but it had, we just didn't go from nine, 10 to 10 too. It was nine, 10, 10 foot, 10 too. Yo. That is allowing us to help them, not to get too wordy, but reach their genetic potential. So it makes it easy when you have athlete and I go back to this, the athletes that I get to work with make me look great. They've bought into what I've asking them to do and they do it without bias. And they usually go away doing it. Coach, you'll appreciate this today. We're going through finals right now at Laverne. And I saw about half of our women's basketball team in the weight room getting after it. And I go on deadlifts to their bar jumps and doing it with a smile on their face. And I think I've got a lot of little weird little opinions and nuggets over my, 26 years of being in college athletics. But because I've been at La Verne for as long as I have, I'm a, I'm like been like the constant. Face that they come back and see, or I'm there. And so it allows them to have an arena or a space to be in, to train really hard and know that everything I'm asking them to do is for them to get better at their sport, perform at a higher level. And then I tell them this too, on their free, like the four years a year at Laverne are real important to me, but 40 after way more, but I want, I want my, all my basketball girls to go out and play the old women's basketball league for the next 10, 15 years, but I want that stuff for them. And so it's the holistic side of it is I'm preparing them for life. Or for the immediate side is I'm getting them ready for their college sports season because I want them to be successful. You are a director of strength conditioning, but I've always seen you as a master teacher and a master coach, and I'm going to pinpoint one of the things you said a little bit ago. You talked about taking a step back and letting your students, your athletes. Talk and train each other and coach each other. That is the sign of a master coach when it's not one on one coaching. It's not one on 15 coaching. It's 15 on 15. It's everybody making a difference. How do you create that? And I'm asking, because we're going to have a lot of parents listening to this, a lot of moms and dads with 14, 15, 16, 17 year olds, how do you get them to buy into the fact. That this is shared growth. This is shared strength that we're doing it together and we're going to be better because of it. That's a great question. When I first started strength conditioning, I think most of what I looked at, read, observed was techniques, exercises, programs. Now I'm reading almost exclusively about leadership, developing the brain. Things along those lines. Because a squat, but when you can give it more context within a group environment and get them to care about it more, it doesn't matter what squat you're doing, they're going to get more out of it. For me, coach necessity is the mother of all invention. And, I just learned over time that. The buy in gets created when they know that you care. So I think we can all sit on a lawn right now and say, back when I was younger or when I started coaching or the kids are different today, they are, but it's because everybody that's around them is put it back on them. I'm going to coach you here, but then I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to turn around because I need you guys to buy into the program. I want you to drive this bus. So identifying your, as I call them, your energizer buddies and making sure that you're giving everybody a voice. So here's a very simple thing. I, it used to frustrate me when athletes wouldn't communicate and talk. I started to force them to talk. So I did things like this. I'd make them at the beginning of each semester when everybody's nervous and nobody wants to make a mistake. I would sit there. Okay. You guys have to ask me 10 questions, anything you want, and all of a sudden everyone's looking at each other. And then one person asks a question and then two and then three, and then all of a sudden 30 questions pop out and then they're laughing, they're giggling, they're smiling. So now they feel like they're in a space that allows them to have opinions. It allows them to have a voice, right? So getting them to open up to me is more important than me coaching them because when they start to talk, I start to learn about them. And then before school starts, I pick a couple of people on each team and I say, okay, you need to teach the warmup to your team. So school starts on a Monday, the first day of school in the fall, all the kids on that team are usually together for about an hour and they're teaching each other the warmup before I even get them. I did that. Because I, I was tired of wasting a day. And I said, you guys just do it. All of a sudden they came in the first day. It was my softball girls and they were laughing and giggling. I'm like, you guys just met each other. This is the no coach we met yesterday. I'm like, I think I just stumbled on this stuff. So then I started doing that. And then I started putting together book clubs with different teams. Yeah. Together with kind of the hierarchy, picking a book, reading, sitting down, going over it, talking about every single person. And all of a sudden I started to notice. The teams were getting closer together. It's great. Much. Happier person, getting them talk and buy in makes it easier for them to buy into what we're asking them to do. I can ask you, I can ask of them because they're locked in because they know it's coming from a place of caring. Vince Lombardi said this freedom through discipline, right? So I'm gonna put'em in a little box to do stuff and I'm gonna give'em a lot of freedom to move. And once their personalities start to come out, if they're doing what I'm asking, I let'em go. I let'em have some fun little things too okay. Who wants to pick the music today? What are we listening to? Not it's everything from the eighties and nineties and I'm the age now coach, you are too, where all of a sudden you're going to go, Oh yeah, my parents like that. I go, Oh my God. So it's finding a way to get them to buy in more. Creating relationships and then giving them the freedom to have choices, but knowing that I'm going to control that stuff because at the end of the day, they are 18 to 22 year olds and I can't let them just go off on their own because it will go sideways really fast. So good, Matt. One of our, one of our participants, one of our parents has a question. It's a really good one. And we're going to get into resilience and recovery and overworking. And this kind of hits on that really well. This dad's got a sophomore high school, sophomore, they have gym class where they work out. They lift, they condition. They, they do their physical education. Then she goes to club and they get conditioned again. They weight lift again. Then they practice. What's too much that That's a great question. What's too much? Oh, I go back and forth on this because when I was a young coach, we used to always jokingly say, no matter how tired, you get a high school athlete, two hours later they're playing open gym for hours, two hours. When they get to the meat of their season and depending on what sport they are playing, there's only a few sports that have legitimate downtime. Football is one of them. You can't play football year round. Your club sports like your volleyballs, your baseballs, softballs, swim, stuff like that is where I start to get really worried about athletes doing too much of the same thing. Everybody's pulling out these kids. Everyone goes we got to do this because of this and this because of this. We, and sometimes. I just wish people would get together and have a conversation. Hey, here's what we're doing here. Here's what we're doing here. I have a few of our baseball players that go to a facility and I say, listen, guys, here's what we're going to be doing here. Okay. Here's what I need from you. When you go to this place, tell them this is what you're doing. So we don't go overdo it. Okay, great. Thanks coach. When I was working with that volleyball club, I would, at that time too, we were also counting foot touches on the ground, how many jump touches and stuff. Over jumping. Athletes is a huge problem right now. I see it with the athletes coming in, teaching them things like how to land correctly, how to balance on one leg, how to make sure that we are, absorbing force and producing force. So I think the biggest thing is you parents know, your kids, if their play starts to drop because they aren't moving quick enough and something, then I feel it's the parent's job to step in. I am continually, that's what I have seen, especially with baseball, because my youngest son is in the middle of it right now, there's a couple of his friends that are having elbow surgery at 14 years old. I can trace that back to having a personal pitching coach, going to a facility, pitching 80 pitches in a week, in a game, one day a week, it's just so much, when do they get to recover? When do they get to taking a step back And just maybe sleep in. I, man, I have all, I have high speed, low drag, all gas, no brakes. But when my 14 year old is tired, I will tell him, I'll tell my oldest son, Hey, take your brother to school tomorrow. I don't need him coming to school with me. And I think that we forget, we kids are kids. And sleep is the best recovery. It's free. Yeah. To let them sleep. So trying to offset the days that they're doing everything with schools, it's. That's a challenge, but I can tell you from being a parent who is watching it right now, go on the days that I feel like he needs some extra sleep, I'll let him sleep. I will allow him to sleep. So that he is getting that recovery. And so I think parents, and again, I'm generalizing, I think parents from what I have watched around here in Southern California, they forget that they don't have to do something every day with a, with a day off to the end of the day. Legitimate day off, get him a day off. Yeah, nothing. Let them play on their phone and play video games. I throw my kids in the, I make my kids go swimming in the pool because there is so much ass of them that for their mental capacity, their mental space, they need a day of just acting like a ding dong for a little bit. Yeah, it can feel better. Take him to the beach. I don't, we live by the beach let them go play in the water. Let them run on the sand, get them out of their shoe, let their feet and their toes do all of this stuff. Cause it's great for their kinetic chain. And don't feel like if you don't do something on a Friday, that you're a step behind you and I grew up in a, in an era and played sports in an era where we went from, but it was, All this football, whatever it was, basketball, spring with baseball, summer was getting ready for something. I was at the beach surfing all the time and I ended up playing college football and all those things help the other one. I personally believe it's the repetitive nature of the same sport all the time, which beats them down. I agree. Yeah. And there's, and th studies that very clearly are multi sport athletes happier, they play their more coachable, right? I a couple of weeks ago and to sit down with the base and then I met the head b The head baseball coach at Oregon State, which is the top 10 team in the nation when we call it baseball, recruits two sport athletes. He wants two sport athletes. He doesn't want guys that just play baseball. He was a wrestler, football player, and baseball player, and he played in MLB. So he wants multiple sport athletes. They feel like they're going to miss out on a showcase or this all star game. They're not going to, if they're good enough, someone's going to find it. That's right. Somebody will find it. That's right. It's funny. You talk about Oregon state. I just talked to Matt Lyle, who's the assistant softball coach up there now, and they're hitting coach. Matt talks about the same things, how important that break is and that multi sport athlete is and finding joy, and it's probably where my biggest mistakes were as a coach where I didn't do enough of. All right. We're not practicing today. We're going to play wiffle ball. We're going to play kickball. We're going to go to the movies today, so I think from a coaching perspective, us coaches, we play a big role in, in identifying when those kids need that break, when they need a breather, when they just need to get that sport out of their head for a while, let alone off their body. It's funny. You're a basketball guy coached it. I see more injuries in basketball in the off season that I do because it's right about that 90 minute break when somebody hops into a pickup game that's rested and somebody's tired. You got people moving at two different speeds, ankle, shoulder. And I just wish sometimes some of the coaches would go, Hey, get an hour and you're done. Get out, go do something because along with the body, the mind needs to, you're we're in college, the mind needs to go learn and see different things and interact with individuals. And having my two boys has really brought me to, want them to have experiences in life and want them to be around different people and experience new things and see new things and formulate ideas. Just so they can pull on it later in life for references to make really good decisions. Yeah, that's the nature of significance. It's significant learning. It's I don't want to just be good at this. I don't want to just, I want my whole body, my mind to get better. So I love that. Let's keep moving forward. Coach. We called the webinar tonight. We talked about the competitive edge. I, if my son wants to be a great basketball player, my daughter wants to be a great volleyball player. They want to make varsity. They want to get recruited. What are some of those skills, no matter the athlete that you really focus on to help every athlete get that 1 percent better that I could do at home with my kids. I'm going to give you one that is more mental than it is physical. To me, the 15 inches between the ears drives what happens below the neck. You have to give an app. You have to have a high care factor about doing the little things when no one's around and no one's watching. You can have, you can be a great athlete in a soft environment, you can be a great athlete in an environment where you're not pushed. But if you truly want to reach your full potential, you truly want to reach that highest level, you have to be willing to sacrifice a little bit. Get up early, get some extra shots in. Get up early, go for a run, get up early. Get a lift in. You're in stay a little bit later. Get some extra swings in. Our baseball team is always at the cages hitting, always at the cages hitting. Our most consistent women's basketball player, it bugs me almost daily about getting my keys via the gym to get some shots in. And she's very unassuming. She just takes your keys, goes upstairs, gets her shots in, comes back down, hands in the keys. She's not there for two hours. She might be up there for 40 minutes. But she has a plan. He executes the plan. So something that I talked to both of my boys about a lot is identifying what you need work. And so for my oldest, who has that low form of cerebral palsy, it's making sure that his right side is getting extra work more than his left. Cause when he races his left side just goes so hard so fast. But then about, we started to notice about a quarter of the way into the season, his right hip was off. Because of the cerebral palsy. So we come up with a plan. Hey, you got to do some more strength training and make sure we're doing some single leg riding stuff. Then with my youngest, it was identifying, okay, it needs to be a little bit faster. So we're going to work on this a little bit more. But there are things you can do every day. My son, I absolutely love because you got to get 50 cuts on your own every day. Mike is now setting up. He going in the garage, get his 50 cuts in and he's sending it to one of the baseball coaches at the college that He does it on his own. He takes his iPad. He sets it up. He videotapes himself and then he emails it for the coach and gets the feedback. I'm not doing it. I'm completely out of it. It's great. And I told him this is on you. I coached you up to 12 to 13 and now I am backing off because you need to hear another voice. You need to have someone else correct you. You need to have someone else give you instruction. Young, I think young people today, they come in and they want to be sold on something, whether it's because of the social media, whether it's because of what's out there now. And we can transfer and go from here to here based on what I like. They want to be sold on something. Sell me. I turn that back around. You need to show me you care a lot. And so providing. Like I will have the athletes lead the warmup sometimes. And I want to see who knows it. And you will see really quickly who pays attention and who does not. And if they all know they got to pay attention because they might have to be out in front of everybody else, they're going to pay attention. One thing that I know we do at my house, which is when dad has the kids because I co parent is. I put a lot of emphasis on them doing the little things correctly and just being organized on a daily basis. Now we're getting into like dad stuff, but having them prepare their meals for the next day, lunches, breakfasts. I'm trying to teach them foundational things that carry them for the rest of their life. Now, how does this translate to sport? It forces them to be organized. They don't leave the house, not with their belt or their shorts or whatever, or their bike or their helmet, whatever. No, you gotta have your stuff. And that gets them to care a little bit more. And if they can cultivate those steps in their daily routine, the translation is when they get to where they're gonna go and what they have to do, they're gonna be ready for it. Love it. But if they don't, they're gonna be all over the map. be dialed in and ready to that's been in your gym a on your website because y and the pictures, all the if there's five something together, they can see it. I love this v put out of the Tampa Bay their infield and the pic ball and you see the short baseman take that early h into the pitch. Every pitch, they're doing it together. It's like they're connected by a string. So I love that mentality of be prepared, learn to be accountable for your actions, having that symmetry, not even, not just in how you lift and how you condition, how you work out, but having that symmetry in your life, having that balance in your life just awesome. The athletes, it's funny to something I learned a number of years ago is that when I pulled my phone out to videotape, it got better. They worked up a little bit. And so I would, I started carrying my phone around now with social media and the, where it's at and what it's evolved to. I say, Hey, that is, is that a IgE quality? And they'll be like, no, I'll do it again. I said, okay, good. Like they, they love it. When I talk about them or put a video up of whatever team is doing something. And they buy into it. They love it. So I don't use it. I use it all the time. It's great. Oh, you can't get up there. Oh, okay. All right. That's great. I've been filming my daughter a lot because there's just things that she's all over the place. She doesn't have that core strength yet, that balance. So we've been filming so she can see how off kilter she is or how she's leaning right or left or how she's, maybe the knees are going over the toes a little too much and things like that. So I'm with you. The film goes a long way. What did we used to say when you and I were younger and I and this guy never lied. That's right. Yep, Alan Parson. He knew something, didn't he? Let's talk about resilience. And how do you develop resilience, a focus, that growth mindset when you're training an individual or training a team? I love you using growth mindset. So I'm an, I'm a neutral thinker, right? You got positive thinkers, you got negative and you got neutral. I'm very neutral. I don't want to get too low. So no matter how good something is, it could be better. No, no matter how bad it is, we still got to get better. And so when I'm talking to the athletes and we're doing things, I will let them know, okay, this is not going to be fun, but I'm going to watch your body language and that'll determine how this goes. And so I'm a big body language guy. If I see the word, the athletes don't like doing something that we're doing, let's say it's a conditioning thing. Oh, we're going to do it again. We'll might do it the next day until they start to figure out, Oh, we're going to keep doing this till I enjoy it. So I better find a way to have some fun with it. And so I put them very much in a position of, we're going to do this until you start having fun. It forces them to get with each other. I've done a couple of things over the years where, when we do walking lunges in the fall with baseball and softball, I make him interlock arm to arm. The power of touch is very strong with teammates locking an arm and, that doing things like fireman's carries piggyback rides or for work or just body strengthening. Forces them to communicate with each other. And that also builds up the resilience. Cause I say things like, Hey, you never know. You're gonna have to, you're gonna have to move a car and save somebody's life. You have no idea if you're going to have to save a parent's life, running into a burning house, throw him over your shoulders or run back out. Also putting them in positions to where it's not going to be fun. This is going to be a challenge. Now I'm going to watch you guys. I'm going to watch your body language. I'm going to watch how you handle it. Cause if you only do things that you like, you're not growing. If you only do things that you like, sport has a very sick way of finding what you're not good at, and then attacking it. Teaching the athletes, talking, and it's a lot of talk stuff where we talk about the scoreboard. What does the scoreboard tell us? Who wins? Who loses? Not your emotions. Your emotions, there's no space on that scoreboard for it. There's no space in that scoreboard for how your day was going. There's no space in that scoreboard for what your significant other things is going on right now. So we always try to bring it back to being process driven with what we're choosing and asking them to do. And then also, why are we doing what we're doing? And so I want to normalize those conversations that nobody seems to want to have with them. I'm going to have them do things that are super uncomfortable. I teach all of my water sport athletes to tumble. We cartwheel, we round off, we do handstand walks all sorts of stuff. And at first it looks like the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan, people are laying on the ground'cause they don't know how to tumble A couple of weeks you all of a sudden you see athletes start doing round offs. Really? Handstand walks for 10 yards. Yeah. And that gets them out of their comfort zone so that when I ask'em to do things like, Hey, we're gonna do the competition to air assault, bike ride. They're willing to go hard and then. We're going to, we're going to do things. I came up with a concept I stole from a buddy of mine. It was called a minute to win it. So I picked four athletes, put them on an aerosol bike. I said, we got one minute. Let's see how many calories you guys can get go. And all of a sudden they take off. It also allows people that maybe don't play a lot to be good at something. So get a position on the team. That's important too, that everybody on the team feel like they're part of something, right? We use a lot of non traditional tools with our circuits outside battle robes. So a bunch of sled stuff, aerosol rides sometimes taking an exercise in the weight room and then for us taking it out to the turf and doing it with teammates, it gets better because it's not in a weight room for whatever reason, the minute they leave that weight room, they also leave their stigma of, Oh my God, it's heavyweight or whatever it is, but also we get them out on the turf and they're doing it on. And so it just shows them like, Hey, I can do that. You just got to connect the dots a little bit. And then the last kind of piece of that is conditioning. Nobody likes, I shouldn't say nobody, very few people wake up and go, I'm going to go condition. That sounds like that's the fun. When we do get to it, their bodies are built up. I don't feel like I have to run them to get them in shape. I feel like I can do these metabolic conditioning circuits with them and we get in better shape and it saves the leg. That's right. So I think that's a big one too, because certainly sports, Don't lend themselves to being great runners on certain athletes. And so I don't want to, I don't want them to be like you can't run. You can't do this. No, let's get you in great shape. Let's build you up. And then all of a sudden you walk. And I think that mindset of allowing them to be challenged. I talk about this all the time. You gotta be comfortable. Anytime you want to develop these resilient athletes, you have to continually talk about, put them in positions, remind them of what they've accomplished. And then push them a little bit more. So it's a constant evolution. This last spring I started with our volleyball program and we just went to the national, the elite eight, right? We had a new year and the first time we won a conference championship since oh, wait. And I took the first three weeks of the spring semester and I pushed them. I, when I go, when I tell you, I, I walked up to that line and I was close So going over in terms of just asking them to do really hard stuff to figure out how hard I could actually put them to ask them to do things like, we're going to, this is going to translate to all of them. And all of a sudden vertical along the way, they learned a lot about themselves and unless you're willing to not only spend time there, but also show them that being there is okay. And they're going to be fine. That's when real growth happened. Yeah. And we have one girl, a team, particularly her name is Jackie Coaston, and I love Jackie to death. Jackie is, she's very eclectic. And if you were to put us in a room two years ago together, we just would have stared at each other. There would have been nothing said because we're polar opposites in some respects. That girl showed me so much. He grew so much in terms of her realizing that I have so much to give to this team. But if I had let her go about her business, the way she wanted to do it, we would have never met. She ended up being all region. She had 15 blocks in one college game. It's amazing. This girl, holy cow. And we have a, we have four stacks now. And she won the only one on the team all year. Second team, they got stronger as the year went on and she lifts the motion super strong. And it's a, I hate to say it, I don't want to say it's encouraging, but there's a lot of similarities in terms of. You got to push them in a direct one. And then once they start going back off and let them derive themselves, and when they do, they look around and go, Holy cow, I'm way out in front of everybody else. It's amazing. Like she, she deadlifted over 300 pounds a year. Wow. Yeah. And everybody in the team got so excited for her when she did that. It's great. Oh, I just, it warms my heart. And, I can't tell you how many stories like that I have over the years. I'm watching athletes do things like that. And then realizing I can do anything conversation today, the level you perform or the level you play at division, whatever in high school and all college, that's all it is. The division life has no division, right? There's no division three in life. There's no jobs. When you go to apply for a job, if you want to be, let's say a teacher. You have no idea who you're playing against. It's someone that came from the University of Denver, University of Southern California, University of Texas, University of La Verne, Occidental College. You need to go out there and compete for that job. And I guess, at the end of the day, that's like my big thing with the athletes at our level is make sure that we are preparing them for life. Now, that also goes with my son's age group at the high school. Putting them in positions to challenge them because, again, to leave high school kids to do what they want, oh my gosh. I've asked them to do some really hard things, and they're doing it, and I high fived them. And then they start to see each other, and they high five each other, and all of a sudden, the whole room gets behind them. And just, creating that space and, it took me growing as a coach and a person to allow them to have these things and being a physician, where they can grow, and see oh, I can do all this stuff, this is so cool. It's so refreshing, Matt. For me, I'm old school like you are, and I'm trying to always be better at being new school, but what you just talked about your volleyball program. I always use the analogy when I'm talking to kids about the governor on a 16 Wheeler. You know what I mean? We're that big vehicle that whatever it is, eight, 10 tons of truck. When it's trying to go real fast, it's got a governor on it. going to keep it at 65 mile an hour. So no matter how that truck driver pushes that, that accelerator, it's probably not going to get over 70, 75. And I think for kids, that governor is. Innately inside of them, they think they can get to here. And that's why coaching is so important, whether it's on a basketball court, a volleyball court, a baseball field, football field. Doesn't matter. It's somebody to push them to realize that you can get through that governor. You can get, there's more to your potential than you think. And if we don't take them to that line every once in a while, they never know where it is. Spot on. If you want to really see, you got to creep towards that line a little bit and then come back, I've used this analogy, but we've all been in some sort of sporting event, a run, a one on one ball game where you're like, but then all of a sudden you look over at your opponent or you see them wheezing and you go, I ain't that tired. That's right. You're fatigued, it goes away. And you're able to find another gear. That's how important the mental side fall is. That's where that mental ability to shift and go, okay this is hard. I'm going to, I'm going to control my breathing. Yeah. And I'm going to focus on my teammates. Let's be external with our energy, not internal with it. And so we talk a lot about, Hey man, when you're tired, go find a teammate. Don't stand there by yourself. Go find a teammate. So one of the things I've been doing the last couple of years is I make everyone high five each other. Always high five each other. So in between reps, we'll high five somebody. When I was running my soccer kids over the summer, you'd see them just walking around, high fiving each other all the time, but it keeps everybody engaged and allows that one person. Who maybe is struggling a little bit. It tells'em like, Hey, my teammates care about me. I gotta set my game up. Yeah. That the word is culture, right coach. It's that culture of we're all in this together. We're all gonna do it together. I say this all the time, misery loves company. It does, but so does positivity. Positivity, really love company. And when you can identify that person to either energize or bunny, keep everybody going then allow you to use them, why not use them? I don't know how many times, and I know you've done this as a coach. You walk by someone and go, hey, I need to pick you up. And they're like, got you. You want that? I loved it when coaches did that to me. Hey, Matt, I really need you today. You got it, coach. I won't let you down. That's an invitation to go harder. That's right. And it's challenging. And it's very quiet. I just walk by and go, hey, today, I need it more than ever. That's it, coach. No problem. We'll And it's got to do with, and I, now lovingly say this to all the athletes, the hard work is not temperature. Okay. Paying attention is not, it's person. That's right. So I get this question. I had a question. Who's the mentally toughest athlete you've ever coached? Female volleyball player. Hands down. Not a football player who puts a helmet on. A female volleyball player who had to go through something unthinkable, unspeakable, and still take her team to the national championship. That blows my mind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actually just text it if we were together then, you're a master Pied Piper, Matt, and and kids just follow you because you've got that energy and you've just created more and more Pied Pipers. I don't know how much, Nicole Wandler, you've been paying attention to Nick. Just, we, and this is a girl that you and I both coached and, didn't have an ounce of strength in her whole body. And now she's doing these amazing races and weightlifting and cross training and, and, we all find it at a different age, but for me, I think the message I want families to hear tonight is that you can do this as a parent too. It's going for a walk, going for a bike ride, throwing the ball around just getting outside, going golfing with each other, playing tennis, doing something active together can make a world of difference in where your kids had it. My job lends me to having these experiences at athletics. Because that's what I do all my daily, but I've had parents over the years. So how do you just go like that? The walls immediately come down and they'll all go out and something happens, You can take painter's tape make a 10 18 by 18. That's a speed ladder We'll take the speed ladder down and you throw to them say this to them. How can I help what not pay for a coach? Can I go rebound for you? You want to go play catch and I throw you some passes that goes so You It does. It does Matt. We've kept everybody for an hour. So I'm going to thank you here in a bit, but thank you for everybody that's on that's listening live. If you'd like to schedule a strategy session with me, you've got a kid that wants to get recruited. You can scan here or go to my website, coach Matt Rogers. com. If you'd like to buy my book and college recruitment, you can scan that. You can find it on my website. You can find it at Amazon. You can find it on any of the booksellers. We've got one question from Tom Foster. Tom, this is a great question. I actually was just in a gym the other day, talking to a coach about this, man. I want you to answer this one really quickly. If you can, do you use the VertiMax for conditioning sessions? And what's your thought on VertiMax? Oh, we don't have a VertiMax at all. I I know what the VertiMax is, the budgies and the cord conditioning wise, so if I look at conditioning, I'm going to do let's say 10 to 15 second jumps with the VertiMax. Then I got to give it in three to one work to rest ratio. So if we're going to talk about conditioning like that, use something similar with bands, it's just not the vertical understood. And Tom, again, is there some, if they Google anything, Matt, to get the same thing out of the VertiMax that they can get through something else. Is there someplace they can go to get some of that information? Again, another area where I've changed is YouTube. YouTube. Yeah. Everything. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to YouTube to pick something in the house, but along with Health and Fitness, You too. If you have any questions, I will go to YouTube, find what I want them to do, and send them the video. So if you were to type in Bandit Jumps on YouTube, I guarantee you'll get 100, 000 hits. Something along those lines. Love it. Love it. Big thanks to Coach Durant. You can follow him on Instagram. I highly recommend it. You're gonna learn a lot at Coach Durant. Is that right, Matt? Do I have that right? It's just Coach Durant. Is it, or is it coach Matt Durant? Okay. So follow him on Instagram. You're going to get some great advice and direction, Matt. It's so great to talk to you. So thankful to have you on I could do this every week with you. And I know we can come up with a new topic and just amaze people with your knowledge and experience. So thank you for all you do. Thank you for the love you have for the student athletes that you work with. It's one of my. Things that I miss the most about coaching at Laverne is just being around you every day. You brought me energy. I care greatly about my student athletes. So I'm just, I'm thankful Laverne still has you. I'm thankful that your boys have you and I wish you well and a Merry Christmas and a happy new year. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for everything. I do tell one little story about you is that when you were going through the hiring process, We had just come off with a coach who wasn't really going to hold the girls accountable and asked you a question about that. And you go, Hey, this is how I handle this move. And I went, Oh, we're going to be fine. And you and I had a great, have had a great relationship since. So thank you for having me on here. And please keep doing this because I know that parents out there have. Boatload of questions they do. And I'll probably have you back on, we may do this like once a quarter and we'll just pick a topic and address it. But if you're a parent out there listening to this or you're listen to the PO listed it on the podcast Matt's one of those people that's taken his profession and just said. Let's blow it up. Let's see if we can make it different. Let's see if we can make it diverse. Let's see if we can make it better. And he does it every single day. And I've never seen kids and I hate to call them kids because they're all 18 to 23 years old, but I've never seen a group of young people. Just absorb a coach like they absorb Matt and and he's got so much good to offer the world. So thanks for everything, coach. We'll talk soon. Take care. That's a wrap for this final episode of Season 1 of the Significant Coaching Podcast. I'd like to thank Matt Durant for closing out our first season with some inspiring but practical strength and conditioning advice for athletes, parents, and coaches. I'm really excited because we have a great new look for season two, and we've got some amazing guests already in the can. We've got great recordings coming your way, including a number of D1 coaches and a great 2025 D1 softball recruit, whose recruiting advice has gone viral on social media. That's a great conversation. Thank you for supporting the podcast. I'm excited to bring you great guests and wisdom in 2025. As always, you can connect with me or subscribe to our weekly coaching and recruiting newsletter at CoachMattRogers. com. Thanks again for listening. Have a significant week and a great new year. Goodbye until next time.