Last March, Northwestern assistant strength and conditioning coach Tom Christian surveyed the football players’ 40-yard dash times with unease. Coming off a dreadful 3-8 campaign, Christian knew if he didn’t improve the Wildcats’ team speed, they stood to be run off the field again in the fall.
Christian brainstormed with Larry Lilja, the head of strength and conditioning for NU athletics, and they concluded that they would have to embark on a journey — a speed vision quest, if you will — to seek a remedy.
“Larry asked me to learn everything I could about speed enhancement,” said Christian, a former Cats linebacker. “After we saw the results of our first training day back in March, we realized we need to get faster.”
Head coach Randy Walker had declared that his team needed to be “bigger, stronger, faster, or we were going to win three again.” Today the Cats are 5-1, sitting atop the Big Ten and setting their sights on their first New Year’s Day bowl game in five years.
Christian and Lilja found their answers in the rigorous, cutting-edge training program of renowned speed guru John Davies. And the coaches accepted their roles as tormentors, knowing the agony would pay off.
“The very first day coach Lilja came up to us and said, ‘I’m going to tell you something and you might not believe me. Everybody has the capacity to run a 4.3, you have that in your muscles,'” linebacker Billy Silva said. “When everybody heard that it was like ‘OK, that’s what I’m talking about.'”
• • •
It was at a high school in suburban Hinsdale, Ill., that Christian met football and track coach Chris Kolfist, who had adopted a new speed program with his teams. Hinsdale High School’s football team finished 9-0 during the 1999 regular season before falling in the first round of the Class 6A state playoffs. Christian was impressed, to say the least, and inquired as to the program’s origins.
The man behind the method was Davies, a speed consultant based in Newport Beach, Calif., whose clients included the Argentina national soccer team and Canadian Olympic track team. By coincidence, NU assistant coaches had seen Davies’ work in action when they scouted Clemson’s no-huddle offense.
On advice from then-Green Bay Packers strength coach Kent Johnston, Davies shifted his attention to football in the mid-1990s. Davies worked with the Packers and Seattle Seahawks in addition to college and high school teams like Clemson and Hinsdale. As a self-proclaimed “architect of human structural kinisiology,” Davies’ program is one of the most popular on the market.
“Clemson strength coach Joey Baston told me this is the most intensive, hardest conditioning program he’s ever imagined,” Davies said. “One of the things I say in my program is that it is relentless. It will take an athlete to the depth of how much he wants to be successful.”
Impressed by what he saw at Hinsdale, Christian contacted Davies, and in spring practice, NU began the rigorous program of drills and sprints designed to develop explosive speed and lasting endurance.
Four weeks later on May 22, players were timed in the 40 once more before practice ended for final exams.
The results were nothing short of staggering.
In electronically timed sprints, linebacker Napoleon Harris went from a 4.61 to 4.49, cornerback Harold Blackmon dropped from 4.76 to 4.60 and wide receiver Jon Schweighardt parachuted down from a 4.91 to 4.68. The tenths of seconds cut from times may appear insignificant. But across only 120 feet of grass, they’re often the difference between a first down and a touchdown, between a downfield tackle and an interception.
“The exciting thing was players felt faster,” Christian said. “They came up to me after a workout and they all said it was the most difficult thing they’d ever been through, the hardest workout they’d ever been through, they were dying.
“And they come up to me, the one who made them do and they thank you for it, they say, ‘Thanks coach, I can feel this is working.'”
Making the players believe in the program was a big concern for Christian and Lilja before starting intensive workouts in July. The regimen called for players, in essence, to relearn how to run.
The Cats ran drills emphasizing sprint mechanics and focused on rarely developed muscles like upper hamstrings, calves and hip-flexors. Players did lower body exercises to bring the strength of their hamstrings up to that of their quadriceps.
On the field, Christian told players to “feel the pop in the ground” or “have your hips up high when you run.”
“Running is a series of jumping, landing, re-accelerating and jumping,” Christian said, demonstrating the motions himself. “If you are landing too far in front, you are doing a lot of breaking every time your foot hits. If you train your hips to be much higher, you strike underneath your hips and every time your foot hits the ground, it’s further accelerating your body.”
Grasping the intricate movements and positions of good running form was a challenge for many players. Christian had players run few wind sprints and concentrated on posture and eliminating extraneous movement.
“I’m not the perfect form runner, so it was like retraining everything I’ve ever thought,” receiver Derrick Thompson said. “It was hard and I’m not perfect or anything, but it worked out.”
While Christian worked with the skill players, Lilja guided the offensive and defensive linemen, who ran shorter, 10-yard dashes. In NU’s no-huddle offense, linemen need endurance to run more plays in less time.
Like their smaller and speedier counterparts, the linemen improved their quickness by an average of .2 seconds, or about 12 percent.
“It really helped our endurance in the no-huddle,” tackle Mike Souza said. “In the Wisconsin game for instance (a 47-44 victory), it’s double overtime and we’re not really tired. We could play another quarter, whatever it would take to win.”
• • •
The summer workouts pushed players to their physical and emotional limits. First, the Cats underwent a torrent of skipping and sprinting drills to improve their acceleration, agility and body control. Then, Christian and Lilja put the squad through a series of military-style calisthenics — jumping jacks, box jumps, and crunches.
With arms akimbo and faces drenched in sweat, players were nowhere near the end. The workouts culminated with the general preparation phase — affectionately known as ‘GPP’ — a stomach-wrenching 18-minutes of aerobic exercise that leave few able to move, let alone walk.
“There was nothing easy about it,” Silva said of the GPP. “We worked our butts off every single day we came out here. We had people hurting, people puking, people wanting to drop out, but we couldn’t do that to the team.”
Christian inflicted the brutal GPP in stages, starting at five minutes early in the summer and slowly increasing the dosage as players got stronger. By the end of July, the Cats were completing full workouts, sprinting faster and lasting longer.
The results are showing this season, as the Cats’ energy clearly lasts deeper into games than it did in 1999.
“The GPP is 18 minutes of constant, constant, constant,” Thompson said. “So you get to the fourth quarter and your body is already trained that when it’s tired, you have to finish anyway.”
The workouts brought more mental strain than physical pain for the Cats, who spent five weeks in the heat and humidity of June and July. Some relief came toward the end of the training, when the players were joined by Christian’s brother Bob, starting fullback for the Atlanta Falcons. Third on NU’s career rushing list with 2,643 yards, Bob Christian starred for the Cats in the late 1980s before moving on to a successful NFL career.
Having followed the Falcons’ workout regime since March, Bob Christian wanted to experience the speed program his brother had been raving about. The NFL veteran drilled, skipped, sprinted and panted alongside NU players.
Two days later, he was gone.
Bob Christian had been done in
by the “55s by 44s” speed drill, which dictate sprints from sideline to sideline, accelerating and decelerating in quick phases with no sense of pace.
“He was hurting,” tailback Damien Anderson said. “You just can’t prepare for it. I don’t take anything away from the pros — they’re great athletes — but I guess they don’t put in the conditioning effort that we do.”
The episode brought some smiles to the exhausted players.
“They kind of got a kick out of it,” Tom Christian said. “They were doing like eight sprints and after the second one Bob said he knew he was in trouble. He was dead last in every one, which isn’t like him. Then the next day he dropped out.”
But the Cats pushed on, finishing the program on July 22, the day of the 40-yard dash trials. It was the final evaluation of the speed program and NU’s progress — the last test of speed.
And the team passed with flying colors.
Silva dropped .23 seconds to 4.70, cornerback Shegun Cummings-John knocked more than one-tenth of a second off his time and linebacker Kevin Bentley stole the show, plumetting from 4.97 to 4.72. The goal Christian and Lilja mapped out five months earlier had been met: At every position, the Cats were significantly faster.
“It’s probably the hardest conditioning test in the country,” Christian said. “I’ve never heard of anybody’s conditioning test being more difficult than ours. In fact, my brother told the strength coaches in Atlanta about it, and they wouldn’t believe him that we passed it nor that anybody passed it.”
• • •
The only lingering question was whether NU would carry its improvement to the season. Anderson had an early answer, as he beat defensive backs around corners and streaked for long scoring runs. Among his 13 touchdowns, Anderson has scoring dashes of 56, 66, 39, 69, 32, 41 and 73 yards.
He broke the 1,000-yard rushing mark last Saturday in a 292-yard, four-touchdown field day versus Indiana, averages 175 yards per game and has vaulted into Heisman candidacy.
“It’s neat to see him realize how fast he is,” Christian said. “To see him turn it on when he sees an open crease and actually see that, ‘Hey, I can outrun these guys. I don’t need to juke. At this point, I can hit it and they just can’t catch me.'”
Most importantly, Anderson can see and feel his improvement.
“I know I’m a lot faster than I was last year,” Anderson said. “It’s just a combination of things, but at the same time you have to be mentally prepared to go out there and be conscious and competent about what you do on the field.”
As a “track guy” in high school, Anderson easily grasped the speed program. Many drills seemed familiar, but in three months Anderson went from a 4.55 to 4.41 — fastest on the team.
Though repeating this summer’s monumental drop is doubtful, Anderson believes he can gain more quickness next season. With the speed program now a fixture in NU’s summer training, Christian and Davies are forecasting Deion Sanders-like times for Anderson in the future.
“My goal with Anderson is I want him significantly lower than a 4.41,” Davies said. “He’s not going to drop .14 again, but we are looking at a serious improvement, an improvement to a guy who runs a mid-4.3 to low-4.3 legitimately. That is out of this world.”
Said Anderson: “I always feel like I can do better, so I felt like I was just breaking the surface when we started the program last year.”
Those words will strike fear in the hearts of Big Ten defenders, who have been unable to contain Anderson and the rest of the Cats this season. In a conference known for power football, NU’s newfound speed allows it to run circles around opponents.
The success of NU and No. 4 Clemson has flooded Davies’ office with phone calls from teams requesting his services. In recent weeks, “75 percent” of Big Ten teams have phoned Davies, he said. But he turns them away, refusing to work with more than one team per conference.
“I’m without a doubt the best-paid coach in the nation in my field, but that’s not what this is about for me,” Davies said. “In truth, I don’t really want to do business with anyone else and I won’t do business with anyone else in the Big Ten nor any competitor of Northwestern.”
Christian saw the improvements this summer. Now he’s happy to watch them displayed on Saturdays.
“It’s very satisfying to see what you work on and what you have them do actually working,” he said. “And it’s fun to see them get excited about it and the difference that speed and strength make in football. It’s tremendous.”
