The Strength of Summer

For Chris Peoples and his diligent group of student-athletes that gather daily in the gym at Robins Campus, the summer off-season is a time of refinement. Collegiate School students can train with a focus on fundamentals, with a steady eye on the athletics seasons to come.

“We’re treating this like an off-season,” says Peoples, Head Sports Performance Coach at the School. “We have time to focus on being efficient — on doing things the right way — and that’s going to help us be successful down the road and will help us with our strength and resilience to injury.” 

Collegiate’s student-athletes meet that opportunity for improvement with enthusiasm. Students sign up for daily workout times — Upper School training sessions go from 9:15 to 10:30 every weekday and Middle School sessions begin at 10:45 — and enter the gym with an alacrity to accept the day’s challenge that Peoples and Justin Brown, Collegiate’s new Sports Performance Coach, have planned for them. 

“The students enjoy coming here,” Brown says. “They see it not only as a time to be with their friends and teammates, but also as a fun activity to do something else that they can take with them for life.”

The training helps to establish sound athletic mechanics, which, once instilled in students, gives them the ability to lead healthy and active lifestyles both on and off the field. “Working on these foundational movements sets us up for success and allows athletes to progress and achieve goals, while also giving them the tools to live a healthy life down the road,” Peoples says. 

Students begin training sessions with speed and agility training, followed by a session of power and strength training. It is intense and vigorous, and there’s a shared sense of competitive camaraderie among the students, each of whom challenges their peers to personal excellence. 

With any workout, though, there is an emphasis on building the framework of a well-rounded athlete. That begins with simple movements and safety protocols. “We teach the basic movements of the body — how to hinge, how to lunge, how to squat, how to pull, how to push,” Peoples says. “Only then, after we’ve established stability, do we go through a typical strength session with the students and let them have a little bit more freedom to learn with their bodies.”  

Collegiate’s Sports Performance program is about both training with anticipation for future athletics competitions and conditioning to live a healthy lifestyle in the present moment. “We want to build a foundation,” Brown says. “That foundation sets them up for really any sport they want to play and sets them up for a lifetime of fitness.”