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When the Duke football team concluded a segment of offseason strength training last month with Max Squat Day in the Yoh Center weight room, barbells loaded with heavy metal were only part of the process.
There was also a heavy metal soundtrack. And flashing lights. Steam. Costumes. And yelling, lots of yelling.
At least that’s the way the session looked when video of the event was posted on Twitter and Instagram — drawing over 25,000 views on the former and scores of fire emojis from former players on the latter.
Max Squat Day: WWE Style ?? pic.twitter.com/8KA1mkFWKC
— Duke Football (@DukeFOOTBALL) June 29, 2022
Max Week ? pic.twitter.com/aEUwDhL0et
— Duke Football (@DukeFOOTBALL) July 1, 2022
The hype was real. New strength and conditioning coach David Feeley conceived of the WWE-style challenge session to bring some fun into the serious business of summer training for the Blue Devils. And the fast-paced captivating video fit well into the program’s recent emphasis on turning up its social media presence. But it also revealed the total buy-in this team has in its new approach under head coach Mike Elko.
In the weight room, those efforts are guided by Feeley, brought to Durham by Elko last January as the football sports performance director. He was a strength coach for three consecutive bowl teams at Miami before becoming a Blue Devil, and he has a 15-year history of working with college football players in the physical fitness arena. His WWE Max Squat Day may have been a fun time to be in the weight room but it came after weeks of work by the players to follow the Elko demand of becoming bigger, faster and stronger by fall camp.
“It takes a long time to get to that,” says Feeley, a New Jersey native who played his college football at Plymouth State. “We push them pretty hard in this room. I’d say we’re intense teachers. That’s the reward — getting a day like that and performing. It’s just like camp. Camp’s going to be hard, there are going to be grueling days, and you want to put them in position to be successful on game day. We take that same approach in here.”
Permitting a layer of fun in the weight room?
“It’s paramount. You don’t want a mundane atmosphere. You can turn a good thing bad and a bad thing good, it doesn’t matter. But if it gets boring and stale, no one’s going to want to be in here. They gotta be fired up and jazzed up a little bit.”
“That was definitely cool,” veteran linebacker Shaka Heyward said of the hype engulfing each player as they tried to hit their top weight in the squat press. “I’ve never experienced anything like that before — being able to dress up for your max squat, having everyone hype you up before you go. That brings a different element to the table. I enjoyed it.
“He’s been a great coach for us, leading us, pushing us. He puts it on the leaders in the room to really bring the energy throughout the entire lift. That’s how we get the juice going. Whether it’s in the morning or the afternoon, that’s where it comes from, the older guys, everybody feeding off their energy when they come into the weight room.”
Feeley tries to harness that energy and turn it in the direction of competition to push each player toward maximum gains with the weights as well as running mechanics and power output in jumps without weights.
“That is a daily item on the list,” he says of the internal competition. “We’ve got three pieces of technology that we use pretty heavily in the room, and we use those so they can measure themselves against what they did that day or the previous week, and then against their workout partners or the guy across the room from them. We’ll rank ‘em, we’ll show ‘em — this is where you are. You don’t like to be last.”
Feeley didn’t know Elko before the hiring process led him to Duke, but he was quick to embrace the new head coach’s vision for the program and how to get there.
“He’s just very straightforward, and I appreciate that on many levels because there’s no gray area,” Feeley notes.
“He’s a constant learner. He wants to know every little thing that’s going on in the program and why. If you have an idea, he wants to know where you came up with the idea. Do you have proven results with it? And he wants to understand every nuance of every plan that somebody brings to him. I can’t get enough of that.”
Dedicated to sharing the stories of Duke student-athletes, present and past, GoDuke The Magazine is published for Duke Athletics by LEARFIELD with editorial offices at 3100 Tower Blvd., Suite 404, Durham, NC 27707. To subscribe, join the Iron Dukes or call 336-831-0767.