First, can you let us know what you’ve been doing since your time in Pittsburgh?

When I left Pittsburgh I went on to coach high school a little bit at North Allegheny in Pittsburgh. I coached football and wrestling. I also had the thrill of coaching for Marty Schottenheimer in the UFL. I never coached against him in the NFL but he coached after he retired from the NFL in the UFL. Coach Cowher hooked me up with him and I could see why he was a Hall of Fame coach.

I was blessed to work with great coaches. My high school coach Coach Minnick, Joe Paterno at Penn State, Cowher, and then to work with Marty. It was a big thrill. It was a great season for me. I coached tight ends and strength and conditioning. If I closed my eyes I wouldn’t have known if it were Marty or Coach Cowher talking. They both gave great talks. There were so many things Bill said that emulated Marty. And I can see why now.

Tell us a bit about Bill Cowher – why do you think he brought you on in Pittsburgh?

I have no idea why. I was the fourth person he interviewed. I guess he wasn’t satisfied with the other guys. I think he was looking for someone who had a similar style of motivation. He was such a great motivator.

It was a two-hour interview. He offered me the job right after. It was a big thrill to work for him. He was the youngest coach at the time and a very enthusiastic guy. I think I had some traits that were similar to his.

With the way guys work out today, was your job at times almost to slow them down vs push them forward so they didn’t overdo it?

Every team has guys that are workout guys. The ones that train 24/7. We had guys like that. There are guys like that, in the middle of the spectrum and at the end of the spectrum. There are guys like that today I’m sure. They all find their niche on how they work out. More and more athletes are finding out you can’t not work out a lot and make it in the NFL. You have to do something.

How do you work with guys that work too hard or not hard enough?

I’m the type of coach that takes the approach that you have to encourage everybody. There was one lineman on the team for example that wasn’t very strong. He didn’t have the genetics to be as strong as some other guys, He worked out but he did less than what others did, but he was a great athlete and could perform despite not being as strong.

There are guys that lift a lot of weights.  I tell them they do a great job. But that lineman, he played for fourteen years. He didn’t give as great an effort and wasn’t as strong, but I had to encourage him like I did the other guys. You’re only as strong as your weakest player, and if I told him he was too weak he would say I was crazy. He lasted in the league for fourteen years. So I had to encourage everybody. Not everyone had the genetic potential to be that strong.

And if they weren’t doing enough to satisfy you or the other staff?

I remember Coach Cowher would ask me three things every year: Who were the top workers; who were players that had potential to get better; and which guys were terrible. I gave him the names of two guys my first time that didn’t work out enough. Two days later they were gone.  You have to try to get better.

In 2005 – NFL Strength Coach of the Year. What did that mean to you and why did you win it?

It came through the society that the strength coaches belong too. It usually went to the Super Bowl champions. It wasn’t so much that I was better than the other guys, but I’ll take any award someone wants to give me!

It was more of a life accomplishment. The teams I coached won a high school state championship, we won championships at Penn State, and we went to the Super Bowl twice in Pittsburgh while I was there. The accomplishment for me was to help those teams win.

The most important thing about my time in Pittsburgh was our record over the fifteen years that I was there. Trainers keep statistics on players that miss games due to injuries. Over those fifteen years we had the least number of players miss games due to injury of any team in the NFL. That’s how you judge if we were good. That’s the bigger accomplishment.

How did you manage do accomplish that?

It wasn’t all me. Cowher knew when to push guys and when to back off. Then there more OTAs and many teams used all fifteen, but he only used twelve. This was when there were no rules in training camp about two-a-days. Hw would never have two-a-days on back-to-back days. We didn’t always go in pads. He was ahead of his time in knowing when not to push players too hard.

Trainer John Norwig is also an institution there. His staff was outstanding, they did an outstanding job healing injured players and in preventing injuries. Cowher also told players to be smart about injuries-  not to hide them. He stressed that players should get treatment. He made it a point to make sure they got treatment if they were injured,

What did you do to help keep those injury numbers down?

Cowher told me when I got there that he never wanted to hear that a player got injured in the weight room. He wasn’t going to be understanding if a player got hurt doing a bench press or power clean, or on dead lifts. I told him I had the perfect program for him because I used slow and controlled lifting movements in my program. It’s another way to get stronger but took the injury factor out of the weight room.

I had only one player get hurt in the weight room, and that was because they hurt their foot when they took a forty-five pound plate off the bar and a twenty-five pound plate dropped off and fell on his foot.

Tell me more about the program and how it prevented injuries like those you see today?

The program did not include ballistic types of movement that cause injuries. I always use the bullrope comparison – the type of rope they use in tug-o-of-war that has thousands of fibers to give the rope strength.

When you power lift – do Olympic lifting or squats – what it does to tendons and ligaments is cut the fibers a little each workout. Over time, it leaves just enough to keep it all together until it snaps. That’s the analogy I always use with heavy lofting.

I had a player who could lift five-hundred pounds, but his career ended when his elbow gave out, Did lifting five-hundred pounds really help his career? No. It ended his career. He pushed his body too hard over time.

Also, as a conditioning coach, I always felt my job was to help players over the course of their life. I want them to be able to play with their kids later in life. The game is so punishing already. Why punish your body in the weight room with heavy lifting and ballistic movement. Some guys do box jumps – weights on them as they jump off of boxes. The stress and strain of those ballistic movements on cartilage and tendons  – it’s no wonder why they have such bad injuries later in life. It accelerates their injuries. They won’t have a pain-free life later on. Some of that pain they have later i due to just playing the game. But why make it even worse? I think my program helped them with that.

In the end, I know some guys are just doing what the coaches tell them to do. But I remember that the strongest kids in rookie camp rarely made the team. It all comes down to whether you can play football or  not.

On a different front – give us a fun story of your time in Pittsburgh?

Oh yeah. So. I got hired by Coach Cowher in March 1992.  He wanted me to have all of the players train at our facility in Three Rivers Stadium for the off-season program.  This was a tall task, twenty-five high schools in the area had better weight rooms than us, and many players worked out in health clubs that had way better facilities than us.  The first two weeks, some players showed up for one or two days, others three days, and just a few for all four days. 

At that point I knew I needed to do something to get all of the players here all four days.  So, this is one of the things I did.  The players got paid $62.50 a day to workout for four days per week, or $250 for the week if they made all four of the workouts.   So I told the players, in order to receive any money for working out, they had to attend all four of the weekly workouts to get paid any money. If they missed one day, they would not receive any money for the week.  Believe me, that’s not what was stated in the player Collective Bargaining Agreement.  It worked though, more and more players were showing up to work out all four days.  Our team camaraderie was getting better, players were pushing each other to work harder. I could see we were starting to come together as a team.  Coach Cowher liked the team culture we were building within the off-season program and that more and more players were showing up for the  workouts.

Well one day, Rod Woodson came up to me and said that he could not make the workout the next day because he had to babysit his kids.  Now, you have to know that Rod was the highest paid player on the team at that time.  Obviously being new to the organization, I was not aware of his  income.  So when Rod mentioned to me about him not being able to make the next day workout, my response was, thanks for letting me know but I want you to know, I cannot play you the $250 for working out this week.  Rod was polite and said with a chuckle, Chet, if I need $250 I’ll go to the ATM and get $250.  It took a few seconds for his comment to sink in, but he was right, he really didn’t need the $250 for working out. 

Now the next week, Rod attended all four workouts.  With a smile on my face, I said to Rod, since you made all four workout this week I’m to save you a trip to the ATM and pay you $250 for the week.  He chuckled back with a big smile on his face and said in return, thanks.  What a great guy Rod Woodson was then, and is to this day!

Ha! Any others?

OK – who do you think was the most intense guy during that time in Pittsburgh?

Greg Lloyd?

Ha – exactly. He was so intense when he stretched. When he lifted. When he ran. He was always the most intense guy on the team. And he was a black belt! When he walked by people they were frightened. But he was also the nicest guy, Did you know he was also an electrical engineer?

Anyway, I had a high school coach who had what he called lollipop Thursdays. All the kids would meet with him one at a time the day before the Friday game and he’d tell each one something they needed to do to help win the game, then he’d give them a lollipop. I loved that idea, so I used that at Penn State and had lollipop Fridays.

So, when I got to the NFL, I did this there too. I did this for every player, and of course Greg was the last guy left in the locker room. I told him he had a great workout, and I had a special treat for him and asked if he wanted a tootsie roll lollipop. He said “Yeah, I’ll take one.” And he said “Hey – I really appreciate that!” I told him again he had a great workout, shook his hand and he walked halfway across the eight room before he turned around and came back.  “Can I have one for my wife and son too?” he asked. He was so appreciative for a lollipop. He was like a high school kid! He could have bought a million of them on his own!

It just went to show that even though these are professional athletes, he still wanted to be appreciated. It was amazing to me, seeing how he reacted, knowing how people thought about him!

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