Heavy Impact

It’s the youngest, and certainly in many respects, the most important element in developing winning athletic programs, especially football, other than the head coach himself. The strength and conditioning coach and his staff can be difference makers between a winning program and mediocrity. Before the early 1960s, only a handful of athletes dared to try weight lifting. “They used to think you’d become muscle-bound,” says Mike Burgener, for decades, the esteemed strength and conditioning coach at Rancho Buena Vista High School near San Diego. That old saw still held true for Burgener when he was a highly recruited halfback in Marion, Illinois. “My dad would never let me lift weights when I was a boy.” When Burgener visited Notre Dame in 1964, he could not resist the salesmanship of the dynamic new coach Ara Parseghian. The clincher came when he visited a priest, Father B.H.B.