All About Connections

How could it not be?

 

Justin Brown and Collin Lawless were holding forth, and when Collegiate’s strength and conditioning coaches share their expertise, insight, and joy with the athletes in their care, they bring an indomitable spirit that both motivates and inspires.

 

Lawless is the relative newcomer. A James River High School and Christoper Newport University graduate, he came on board late last summer when Chris Peoples took his leave to enter the business world. After a drink-from-the-firehose first few months, he’s settled in quite nicely.

 

“It’s been awesome,” he said. “Coach Brown was a great help with onboarding me. It was pretty crazy starting out, to be honest. I was trying to learn people and learn about Collegiate. In the winter and spring, I hit a stride being able to learn as much as I could and build relationships with the kids.”

 

What’s impressed him about Collegiate’s student-athletes?

 

“They’re very athletic and very talented,” Lawless said. “There’re a lot of high-character kids. They want to work hard. They represent Collegiate’s core values in a great way. Because of that, it’s been really fun working with them.”

 

Though he was a highly decorated catcher at James River who had a successful college career, he enjoys his behind-the-scenes role.

 

“For sure,” he said. “It’s exciting to see [our athletes] play on the field and see their excitement and results they get. What we do isn’t in the limelight, but I really enjoy building relationships and seeing athletes build confidence through their work in the weight room.”

 

Brown, a Meadowbrook High School and Virginia Commonwealth University alumnus, is beginning his fifth year at Collegiate.

 

He terms the turnout of athletes this summer as “solid.” That’s 10 to 20 Upper School kids and 15 to 20 Middle Schoolers (each session) for lifting and agility, he said.  When the groups combine on Tuesday and Thursday for speed training, as many as 35 student athletes participate.

 

From his first day on the job, Brown exuded uncommon passion for Sports Performance coaching. Nothing has changed.

 

“Whether it’s year one or year five, whether it’s day one or the last day of the summer, every day is different, every workout is different,” he said. “The same kid will present five different ways within one week. You have to coach that one kid differently all five days.

 

“What I love about Sports Performance is that every day is like a puzzle, a challenge, and you’ve got to figure it out. You’ve got to find the right way to reach each kid each day of the week. That’s what keeps it exciting. Monday, they’ll come in feeling strong as all get-out. They’ll lift all the weight in the gym. Tuesday, they might be beat up from Monday, so they’ll pull back a little bit, but you still coach them to the best of your ability and pull that little bit extra out of them. That’s what coaching is.”

 

Lawless and Brown are all about connections with their athletes as an avenue to excellence.

 

“There’s intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation,” Brown said. “Extrinsic is what happens in your world that gets you going. Those are those big-play moments in sports like that wide receiver running that streaking go route for a 90-yard touchdown and seeing that ‘6’ pop up on the scoreboard. He’ll have that highlight film for the rest of his life that he can watch.

 

“Sports Performance is teaching these kids to find intrinsic motivation. It’s them and whoever their spotter is in that moment trying to accomplish a task. What can you pull from within yourself to get it done? When it comes to a conditioning drill, it’s you, the starting line, and the finish line. What can you do so you can get from the start to the finish to the best of your ability? No one’s helping you. It’s just you.

 

“Coach Lawless and I can write up the best program in the world, but if you don’t want to take the steps to get stronger, bigger, better, and faster, there’s nothing much outside of that that we can do to help you. You’ve got to have that intrinsic motivation. You’ve got to have that fight and fire inside to keep going and keep getting better because this is hard. It’s not for everybody, but we love when our kids decide it’s for them.”

~Weldon Bradshaw