Johnson Keeps Mustangs Running Strong
By MARCUS HELTON
BOWIE – Stu Vetter has long been a proponent of weight training for basketball players, and began putting his teams through lifting programs at a time when many of his counterparts found the practice unnecessary or even counterproductive. Back then, though, that focus on strength came mainly out of necessity.
“You can look at my team pictures from back in the 70’s, and we only had, like, eight players,” the Montrose Christian coach said recently. “We were going to play some good teams, so I knew right from the beginning that we had to be stronger. We started our guys in weight training back then, but the well-known coaches like John Wooden and even Dean Smith at that point didn’t think that strength training was for basketball, they thought it was more for football. And Aas the years went by, people have come around and realized how important strength training is for all sports, and particularly in sports like basketball that you play year-round, its even more important. So, it was just something that I felt would give us an edge, and it’s certainly been a big part of our program ever since.”
Nowadays, Vetter’s team is far from the only one looking for that edge. Basketball-specific workouts have exploded in popularity over the last decade, with many teams employing full-time coaches to handle their workout programs.
“Now people make a living by not just strength training, but basketball-specific workouts,” Vetter said, “and personal trainers have become a thing that’s now accepted, where you didn’t even hear about a personal trainer 20 years ago. But it certainly has taken our program to the next level. … One of the first things college coaches notice when they come in our gym is the fact that our guys are strong athletes, and I think that will certainly help make a difference in the success of our team.”
Currently, the man tasked with keeping the Mustangs – who open the season Dec. 2 at Hayfield High in Alexandria – running is second-year Strength and Conditioning coach Matt Johnson, whose work at the Rockville school last season has high praise from Vetter and his players. Montrose went 25-1 last year, winning the ESPN Rise National High School Invitational and earning a Top 5 national ranking from several media outlets.
“I grew up actually off of natural strength and natural ability I think,” University of Virginia-bound senior forward Justin Anderson said. “God-given talent; just riding a bicycle and doing push-ups in my room. But when I came to Montrose and I got under Coach Johnson, he pushed me to a limit I never thought I could live up to, you know? I was with him everyday during the summer getting better at both speed and strength in all different types of ways that people really don’t focus much on in basketball. But he definitely pushed me to my limit and he’s gotten me so much better on the court.”
A native of upstate New York, Johnson played four years of basketball at Division III Marywood (Pa.) University, and went on to earn a M.S. in Strength and Conditioning from Bridgewater State (Mass.) College. He worked at Boston College and Bryant (RI) University, holds individual and group training sessions and runs his own training website.
Johnson, 26, moved to the D.C. area last summer with his wife. Montrose, meanwhile, was looking for a new strength coach to replace Alan Stein, who now serves in the same capacity at DeMatha Catholic.
“Coming from Boston College and Bryant, I was in a way a little hesitant to come to the high school ranks,” Johnson said recently at the Athletic Republic training facility in Bowie that he now works out of. “But I quickly found out through research and talking to people that Montrose wasn’t a normal high school program. The great thing is that [Coach Vetter] is fantastic. He loves the strength and conditioning aspect; we’ve been going three to four days a week in the preseason here for the past two months, and going hard. Each day we train is about two hours of training, and it’s not all the sexy, flashy stuff. We do a lot of flexibility and massage, which may take up around 45 minutes of a session.”
As part of the interview process for the Montrose job, Johnson put several current and former Mustang players through a workout that earned rave reviews.
“His approach definitely was different, and that made me actually want to achieve more for him,” Anderson recalled. “Normally, when a strength coach comes to an elite program like Montrose, they try to fit in with the boys and they try to sugarcoat the first lift and not get after us. But Coach Johnson, he instantly came after us and pushed all of us to our limit. He came in and he showed that he wasn’t playing any games his first workout with us, and that drew me in in a different way.”
Vetter said he was impressed by Johnson’s willingness to incorporate their two different philosophies into one regimen.
“I’m very much a believer in the old-fashioned bench press, push-ups, sit-ups, lat pulls – those kind of things,” Vetter said, “and he does all of that as well as take it to the next level with many things that certainly none of our other coaches are trained to do. So, it was the fact that he believed in a lot of the things that I believed in, as well as he could take it far beyond my expertise.”
"A PERFORMANCE-RELATED FIELD"
Perhaps the player who has seen the greatest gains from Johnson’s program is 6-foot-10, 240-pound senior forward Kevin Larsen. A native of Denmark, Larsen had never experienced a serious strength training regimen prior to arriving at Montrose last year.
“No, I was just a big kid,” Larsen said. “I never had to do anything.”
After just one full year with Johnson, though, the results have been impressive. Larsen won the team’s Iron Mustang Award this preseason after improving his bench press by 135 pounds and his vertical leap by four inches. He’s also lost 20 pounds since starting the program.
“That just shows that everything he’s saying to do is helping you in the end,” Larsen said. “… This was all new to me. I felt great because I’ve never been pushed like this before, so he helped me a lot.”
Those kinds of tangible benefits are critical to any strength and conditioning program, Johnson said.
“It’s a performance-related field, and you have to show results to these kids,” he said. “That’s why I’m a firm believer in testing, because really, it gives you purpose of training. If you’re just coming in here and I’m kicking your butt for an hour and a half and you don’t really know if you’re improving – maybe your coach is saying, ‘Man, your first-step quickness is really improving,’ or, ‘It seems like you’re elevating on your jumpshot,’ – that’s great, but kids are all about black and white. They’re all about, point-blank, ‘OK, I came in with a 24 [inch vertical leap], Coach Johnson got me up to a 28.’ So, having that I think is very powerful in the athlete’s eyes to see that this is meaningful.”
Johnson said that after two months of preseason work this summer, every Montrose player improved his bench press and ran a sub-6:30 mile. (He said the mile is a tradition at Montrose, but not typically a distance used in basketball-specific workouts. Instead, to capture the stop-and-go pace of basketball he puts his charges through lots of short interval sprint work.)
“Last year, I was really humbled by how Coach felt like what I did was a cornerstone to our success,” he said. “We didn’t have one injury, and that’s kind of what we do: its injury prevention first, and then they need to move better. I want all my guys to be able to be fast, to be agile and to be mobile.”
Johnson isn’t shy about sharing his knowledge, either. He spoke at a Hoop Group camp and gave away sheets with footwork drills to the players, and gave plyometric workout sheets to the coaches in attendance. Johnson added that he’s a firm believer in variety, and said his program is constantly evolving – “If somebody that I trained back in Massachusetts came in here now,” he said, “They’d be, like, ‘What’s all this?’” – to find the most effective techniques.
“It’s a very demanding program,” Johnson said. “A lot of guys need that reassurance that when you get to Duke, or Virginia or North Carolina, you’re going to be waking up at 5 o’clock and weight lifting. So a couple of times this preseason, they woke up at six and weight trained with me. It’s all about the experience – they have done it, they know what it feels like, and now when they get to college it’s not about one time a week coming in and meeting the strength coach at 5 o’clock – that’s three days a week, consistently.”
“I THOUGHT IT WAS CRAZY”
Johnson works out small groups at Athletic Republic’s 7,000-square foot facility, including players from several area public and private schools. He puts his clients through baseline tests to get an idea of where each player is as an athlete and what aspects – speed and agility, explosiveness, upper body strength, etc. – they need to improve upon. From there, he gives them an assessment focus. For high school players, he sits down with the parent and the athlete and has them write down three skill-related goals, three performance-related goals and three academic-related goals, and although Johnson’s not a registered dietician, he also works to make sure his pupils are eating the right things. Johnson also credited Montrose trainer E.J. Scofield with helping to keep the Mustangs in peak condition.
Johnson said basketball players and their parents often wonder how effective his workouts can be initially, due to the lack of basketball equipment involved. Rather than skill work, Johnson puts his clients through a workout that is heavy on stretching and plyometric work, featuring heavy balls, foam rollers and good, old-fashioned free weights.
“I thought it was crazy,” Larsen said. “I’d never seen anything like this before. Just all the drills and stuff, I’d never seen it before, so it was just a shock to me.”
The results are enough to turn even the most ardent skeptics into believers, however.
“After games, I’ll have friends that I play against,” the sculpted 6-foot-7, 220-pound Anderson said, “and they say, ‘Man, every time I try to go past you, it’s like running into a brick wall; I just bounce off.’ I think it reflects my strength and my strength coach. Also, when you’re on the fast break – for basketball players who can and can’t dunk – absorbing that contact has a lot to do with strength. But its not only strength: Coach Johnson does balance and footwork, and those are all important things, because when you’re going up to finish, not only do you have to have strength to finish through, but you need to have balance: how do you come down and how do you land in an athletic base, you know? Those are the little things that a lot of people overlook, but that takes care of your body and that helps you out to move on to the next level.”
Anderson added that Virginia Strength and Conditioning Coach Mike Curtis told him Johnson’s program is similar to what he’ll be doing when he gets to school next year. Johnson said he often gets that sort of response from college head coaches.
“It’s great being able to talk to Steve Lavin, and Ben Howland from UCLA and Mark Turgeon from Maryland and Tony Bennett from Virginia and them watching my workouts,” he said. “I think any person in my position would die for that opportunity, so I’m very appreciative of what Montrose provides and the exposure it gives me.”
In the end, though, it’s a relationship that’s proved beneficial to both parties.
“We’ve had good strength coaches and we’ve had a good program,” Vetter said. “… Our players work very hard, and we have guys in our program that are dedicated to strength training, but Matt takes it to the next level. He’s very thorough in what he does, and has certainly developed our program into one of the top strength programs in the country.”
Contact DMV Elite Editor-in-Chief Marcus Helton at mhelton@dmvelite.com or on Twitter. Also, check out DMV Elite on Facebook!
Matt Johnson photo courtesy of www.StrengthCoachConcepts.com
Kevin Larsen (right) and Justin Anderson (bottom left) photos by Charles Matthews, DMV Elite.
