“The finale!” Ron McKeefery bellows in a gravelly baritone, surrounded by sweat-drenched Dawgs on a snowy Wednesday. The Huskies’ second-year head strength and conditioning coach paces before a yellow bungee cord, with shoulder harnesses attached by crane straps on either end.
Cue the competition.
“I need Roger Rosengarten … and Geirean Hatchett!” McKeefery yells inside the Dempsey Indoor Center, the second name barely audible above the resulting roar. The evenly matched offensive linemen emerge and buckle themselves to opposite ends of the contraption, providing 600 combined pounds of conflicting force.
The more desperate Dawg will win.
By this point, the Huskies have already worked for an hour and 20 minutes — completing cone drills and sled pushes and tire tosses galore. Linebacker Edefuan Ulofoshio’s guttural growl has already boomed above the hip-hop bumping out of sideline speakers. Edges Zion Tupuola-Fetui and Zach Durfee have already sprinted neck-and-neck through a three-cone drill, before Durfee crouched on the turf to catch his breath.
Assistant coach Eric Schmidt has already addressed the team at “halftime” — a five-minute interlude between workout circuits — warning that “there’s one main reason why culture declines, and it’s prosperity. Prosperity. Desperate people live different than prosperous people. We’ve got to be the same starving team that we were out here a year ago.”
With senior defensive lineman Tuli Letuligasenoa inches away, whispering encouragement, a stoic Rosengarten crouches and waits for the whistle. A beat later, it comes. Both he and Hatchett — listed, identically, at 303 pounds — drive their legs in opposite directions, the cord straining against their respective weight and wills; Rosengarten’s lasts a little longer. His legs churn, body parallel to the turf, until Hatchett gives ground and the drill is over.
It’s 8:20 a.m. on a Wednesday in February.
It’s a Saturday in the fall.
“It’s deciding the winner and loser, because we’re going to value winning,” McKeefery says later, explaining the drill. “But the second part of that is, now you’ve got to get up in front of your teammates and peers, and you’ve got to compete one-on-one. It takes guts to do that. It takes guts to go out in front of 70,000 fans and compete at a high level. We’re trying to reinforce that as best we can.”
Everything is a competition. UW’s coaches weave through the drills with clipboards, jotting individual grades and notes. Each workout — every drill and rep and determined step — is filmed and evaluated.
But that’s just the beginning.
“We went even further with our level of accountability,” McKeefery says. “Last year was about challenging guys to make sure they’re on time and just doing the basics. Now it’s, are we getting our multivitamins every day? Are we getting our five meals in every day? Are we sleeping eight hours a day? Are we bringing someone along when we do extra? We’ve really built that into the competition this year, where we reward everything with points.”
They get points — often a “+,” “0” or “-“ — for academics; for weightlifting sessions and personal records; for film study; for following individualized nutrition plans; for sleep and recovery and winning habits. McKeefery jokes that “I’ve got probably a million pictures on my phone of guys going to games to support the other teams [and sending selfies as evidence]. They’re getting points for going to gymnastics or tennis or basketball games.”
He unlocks his phone and flips through a slideshow of familiar faces: Dylan Morris at a basketball game; Dylan Morris at a tennis match; Michael Penix Jr. at basketball.
Everything is evaluated. Everything is a competition.
It’s a Wednesday in February. It’s a Saturday in the fall.
“These guys didn’t come here to lift weights and run around cones. They came here to compete,” McKeefery says. “So we have to tap into that. It’s a hard thing to keep guys motivated eight months before the season. So you’ve got to tap into that competitive spirit to really get them to buy into what they’re doing.”
And like with Rosengarten and Hatchett, that competition has winners and losers. It’s recorded on a constantly updated Excel spreadsheet titled “Grade Report Winter 2023,” which all Huskies have access to. The grades are accompanied by individual notes on where some players are excelling and where others must improve.
Sitting at the desk in his office, which faces the Husky weight room, McKeefery notes that “in a world of NIL and one-time transfers, you can either give them only what they want to hear and placate to them, or you can be completely transparent and lay out why they’re at where they’re at. I think our guys respect that.”
From an evaluation standpoint, McKeefery’s priorities have evolved. A year ago — with a 4-8 record and an unproven roster — the priority was “trying to shed body fat and really lean out and make it so our movement is efficient and that we were in shape to be able to handle the rigors of our practices. But this year we didn’t have to do that.
“If we’re talking game of inches, we’re trying to take that extra step — be able to cover that extra yard, get that ball that’s off the fingertips. Our guys feel really good. Seeing them run around and compete right now, I think they’ve taken a huge step.”
That’s evidenced, of course, by an 11-2 record and a national ranking — by immediate proof of process. But every team does mat drills; every team wins the offseason and talks about titles.
In the tug of war between prosperity and desperation, which will win?
“Coming off of a nice season a year ago, we still didn’t control our own destiny at the end,” McKeefery says. “That’s our mission this year, to control our own destiny and be able to handle anything the season throws at us. For us to do that, we have to do it better and harder than we did a year ago. That’s going to show up in the details.
“Going into spring ball, there’s a lot of people patting guys on the back for a job well done … and it was. But we have to be able to flip the script right away and challenge our guys to take even another step.”