Lovett's take before summer workouts: 'Drastic changes' | Looking for culture change | Hopeful for payoff from post-spring Combine
Justin Lovett’s desk was littered with information.
Stacks of sheets with color-coded charts, detailing the progression of each Purdue player by position group, popping with green (good), yellow and red (not good) boxes. Another stack had rows upon rows of measurables. Another list had names hand-written.
Soon the stacks will include detailed evaluations from Lovett, the strength and conditioning coach for football, and all of his staff, and then those will be bundled into binders and given to the coaching staff, offering up detailed reports as if the coaches don’t know anything about any player, Lovett said.
There will be pictures, too, the physical evidence, so to speak, of any transformations undergone by the Boilermakers in Lovett’s first summer conditioning program.
Armed with the data, the pictures, the numbers, the knowledge of walking alongside each player every day during training, Lovett has a full picture of Purdue’s summer progress.
The gist: The Boilermakers made gains in most categories, but they’re not done. Not by a long shot.
“We did get stronger, we increased our work capacity, we set them up for camp. Did we make all the gains we wanted? No, there’s still some things left on the table,” Lovett said Monday. “But the nice part about working for Coach (Jeff) Brohm is how he structures camp. We can still get numbers. We can still chase numbers in the weight room and we can still find ways to improve through camp. It’s not just hang on for your life through camp and then we’ll see what we have by the time we get to the first game. It’s not like that. Coach Brohm is very in-tune with his players and he’s very adaptive toward, ‘Hey, let’s take shots here. I’m going to be pretty easy on them on the field, you have a chance to get some numbers and chase some growth.’ So that’s kind of nice.
“We represented the summer really well in the fact that we got a lot of work done, but we’re going to continue to attack in camp and take our shots. It’s a work in progress, and we have a lot more work to do.”
The focus heading into the seven-week training program was multi-directional speed — every group needed to become more agile, quicker — and Lovett said he felt like the group did improve in stop-and-start, lateral speed and top-end speed. But the program was new for the strength staff, and they made sure to meet each week to tweak and reassess about the logical next step. With a roster that needed considerable development, according to Brohm and Lovett, finding the right balance of pushing players hard in a small amount of time to produce gains was a challenge at times.
Brohm lamented his team’s inability to “finish” well in the spring — it showed up on film, he’s said, players not willing to exert all their energy and press through fatigue — so that was another emphasis in the summer. Lovett said the first three weeks of the summer were rough in that regard, having players realize they didn’t have to “protect” themselves from pushing to their limits because they weren’t going to get drilled beyond that. Once they understood there wasn’t another shoe that was going to drop, Lovett said, they started to earn trust and release more energy and push hard.
“It wasn’t easy, and we’ve still got to finish that going into camp. We still have to work on that. We’re not there yet,” Lovett said. “As long as I’ve been with Coach Brohm, that’s been a staple of his program. We might not have the most talent, we might be operating at a talent deficit, but, boy, those kids play hard. We’re on our way. We’re not there yet. But the influx of new competitors, JUCO kids and transfers, that moved the needle quite a bit because those kids don’t care that the previous team was said not to finish. They could care less. All they know is what they know. We egged them on and we really put them in situations to experiment and get after each other and say, ‘Is this what you want? Is this the type of finish you want?’ Or ‘what do you want to see? Is that acceptable? Should I say, That’s good, and bring them up? Or Bentley do you want to send them back?’ ”
Lovett gradually started hearing the team’s leaders answer him with, “Send them back, that wasn’t good enough.” And reps were repeated.
That wasn’t just a good sign of a potential transition into a group that’s not satisfied, a team that’ll keep pushing, but it also was an indicator of a shift from a coach-led program to a player-led one, which was another goal Lovett had for the summer.
Lovett said there were only a handful of players who didn’t quite grasp the intensity and expectations of the program early on, and, so, that led to him essentially kicking them out of workouts, even pushing them to the co-rec instead of using Purdue’s football facilities. But nearly all of those issued those directives came back with a greater appreciation for the approach, and that partly was due to the pressure and response of their teammates.
“I liked their attitude, their willingness to attack and their willingness to be coached and take hard coaching. Really liked that,” Lovett said of the team overall. “Loved their response to situations where we’d say, ‘You have to drive the bus. We’ve been too coachy in the winter and the spring.’ So if we put those guys on the spot, they took the reins and got after each other a little bit more. You give them an opportunity, sometimes players don’t take it, it’s uncomfortable. But we had a good group of leaders in here that would take the reins and they did it in a way where it wasn’t just, ‘I have to do this because the head coach is saying this.’ It was organic and natural, like the way we wanted it to be, so I was happy they took opportunities to address issues.”
That kind of veteran leadership also showed up in another key area: Optional workouts.
Entering the summer, Lovett figured he’d learn a lot about this group based on who and how many guys showed up on Saturdays for the variety of optional programs he and his staff offered, ranging from MMA training to “speed school” to “monster training.” The players had a chance to choose whichever program they wanted to attend, and each lasted for about an hour.
The lowest-attended Saturday was with about 55 guys, Lovett said, but there were as many as 85 at others. And it was the right mix of guys, too: It needed to be players who are expected to contribute in the fall, not only young players hoping to develop.
“That went really well,” Lovett said of Saturdays. “We felt like we were able to tie in what we worked on during the week and maybe on the field. If we were missing out on kids, it was a lot of the freshmen, and we don’t really need them here on Saturdays. If (freshmen) want to go home, go home. But the veterans, we needed the veterans. Sometimes those numbers are 55, 75, 85 kids, those are empty because you’re not getting the right kids.
“Kids felt like they had a buffet of performance options to choose from. Choose your own adventure. Some kids, they came for MMA at 9, at 10, they hit speed school and then at 11, it was monster school, which was awesome. Have kids do all three, it was like, ‘All right, you just spent three hours here, you can go away.’ We liked it.”
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