CSCS stands for Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist- essentially, it is the requirement to be considered a qualified strength and conditioning coach. Sadly, less than 5% of High Schools in the Nation can say they have a CSCS on staff, why? Because they don't come cheap, so only a handful of schools are able to afford one. 

 

This frustrates me as I do not think that proper strength and conditioning should be pay to play, nor do I think the alternative of simply hiring an existing teacher/coach or someone who is "into fitness" is the right way to go about this. 

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A lot of Athletic Directors who agree with me instead elect to purchase a program off of the internet- though this is good in theory, these standardized programs fall short- why? Well, they don't take into account any specifics of your team/school/situation. Such as, the amount of training days your team has, whether you have access to indoor turf during winter, do you have medicine balls/hex bars/TRX Rows, etc. Furthermore, they don't take your specific team into account. Does your High School have 1800 kids and your Football team rarely has guys playing both sides of the ball? Or do you frequently have kids playing offense and defense and you need to prioritize muscular endurance and cardiovascular training a bit more? Do most of your kids just play one sport or do they play multiple, etc. All these questions and factors matter when trying to send a kid D1 and set kids up for long-term success in fitness and in their sports. Also, these programs don't see you through to the finish line. They give you a solid starting point but you can't reach out to them when hurdles arise or ask questions as they come up- that's want I want to solve. 

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If your existing coach isn't qualified to program for your athletes, why not bring a professional in? The goal is not to replace them, but to work alongside them. I want to combine his/her leadership abilities with my knowledge of strength & conditioning and sports performance in order to give your High School one of the top S&C Programs in your State. Also, I want to act as a resource and a reference point for them to ask questions and help them grow in the S&C field to a point where they are fully self-sufficient and your school/team can move on from my services. 

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Most High School strength coaches do great things for their athletes, but they fall short in some regards. Typically, this seems to be with proper warm-ups, proper periodization, agility training, proprioception training, and injury prevention. The reasons for this is that these things require a good knowledge of the field of Sports Performance- however, all these things can easily be corrected with a qualified strength coach. The exciting part is that these concepts have extremely strong correlations to on-field performance, as a result, your athletes can make massive improvements in one off-season when you begin to incorporate proper training protocols for some of these difficult concepts.