Building teamwork as a school is a vital part of the strength and conditioning program. At Westminster Christian Academy, I rarely get to train any of my teams as a group. The only time that happens is with the football team during the summer training program. The rest of the year, I train students in a mixed setting during my classes and after school.
There are both positive and negative aspects to this training environment. The main positive result is that all of our students see each other working and can appreciate each other’s efforts. The negative is that each team doesn’t have its own “team building” time together in the weight room. However, I believe that is a small price to pay, as each team has time together in practice as a group. When our volleyball team was on its journey to winning a second consecutive state championship this year, the athletes on the football, baseball, basketball, and softball teams, etc., all knew how hard they had worked because they had been with them in the weight room.
Having groups mixed with different sports teams can also help foster the “one community” philosophy our school embraces as its motto. This also allows me to speak the same language about personal growth to all our student-athletes. When we discuss our core values, hard hat lessons, athlete attitude spectrum, and strength and conditioning motto, they all hear it together.
We start the year with our strength and conditioning motto, “Day by Day.” Our athletes will wear shirts and wristbands with lanyards and stickers with these three words branded. They will also use that phrase when breaking down before and after each lift. I explain to them what this phrase means because I want them to have a purpose behind what they say and promote.
When we go through this together, I give my students a card containing the poem “A New Day” by Heartsill Wilson. We talk about how that poem expresses the importance of each day and eloquently gives them a great understanding of “Day by Day.”
Our second step in personal development is to walk our students through our five core values. We deep dive into each core value and what it means for the coach and the students. After diving into each core value, I give them a seven-step process to create their core values. I explain to them that as much as I want them to know and understand the strength and conditioning program’s core values, it is more important that they create their own.
Our next personal development step is going through our athlete attitude spectrum. This allows our students to take a deeper look at their actions and how they affect the culture of their team, their class, and our school.
The final step in personal development is acknowledging the hard hat lessons. We take these 21 lessons from Jon Gordon’s book, “The Hard Hat.” Each week, we go through two-three lessons and talk about real-life applications. Each week after going over the lessons, the students vote on which male and female student best lives out that lesson. The following week when I reveal the student representative they chose, those two students will sign a Westminster hard hat.
Adding these four big pieces of our personal development program with the smaller pieces allows us to make a lasting impact on our students beyond the weight room, field, and court, and hopefully into their lives after graduating from Westminster Christian Academy.
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Garrett Keith is in his 14th year as the strength and conditioning coach and high school P.E. instructor at Westminster Christian Academy. He is also the director of transformational coaching and teaching at WCA. Garrett graduated from the University of North Alabama, where he was a four-year letterman and captain (2002) on the football team. Following college, Keith returned to his high school, American Christian Academy, to start his teaching and coaching career. He worked there for five years before moving on to WCA.
Coach Keith was named the 2019 NHSSCA National Coach of the Year. He has served on the association’s certification editing committee and the awards nomination committee, speaking at numerous regional events and being a guest on many strength training podcasts. He is also CSCS certified.
