Ben Creamer remembers the moment when two worlds merged.
It was 2009, and Creamer — then the performance director for Ignition Athletic Performance Group in Mason, Ohio — was preparing Cincinnati linebacker and future second-round pick Connor Barwin for the NFL combine. Creamer also doubled as a boxing coach and cornerman, and he put his football players through boxing training on Fridays for extra conditioning.
Which is when boxing training … became football training.
“(Barwin) has both boxing gloves on. I’m holding the mitts for him,” recalled Creamer, now the director of sports science for UW football. “And he says, ‘Hey, put both your hands out there. Stick your mitts out.’ And with his boxing gloves he hit a side swipe move on the pads. From that second, a lightbulb went off. I’m like, ‘That’s what’s missing.’”
Creamer — a judo black belt who also trained in boxing and wing chun kung fu, while playing football, basketball and baseball in high school — had never incorporated martial arts concepts in football training.
Nor, really, had anyone else.
So, as he worked both with Ignition and as a strength and conditioning coach for the Cincinnati Bengals, the need for a football hand combat curriculum became increasingly clear.
“There were certain days where I would go down to the Bengals stadium for lifts. I’d have to drive back up to Mason (25 miles north) to train my fighter, and then drive back down to the stadium for practice,” Creamer said. “(During that period) I noticed a gap in the skill development, especially when it comes to hand fighting for football.
“A wide receiver or a quarterback can throw or catch all year round. But offensive line and defensive line, outside of practice and games, they have limited opportunities to actually work the art of combat — the martial art of the pass rush, if you will. Hitting a dummy doesn’t do it, unless Frankenstein is trying to block you.”
So, despite being “5-11 and 175 pounds soaking wet,” Creamer proceeded to earn a black belt in the martial art of the pass rush. Over the next 11 years, he worked as a hand combat coach and consultant for the Bengals and other NFL athletes — developing a program to utilize boxing, wing chun and judo principles on a football field.
“I would reverse engineer pass-rush moves and bounce them off guys like Geno Atkins and Luke Kuechly and Carlos Dunlap and AJ Green and Carl Lawson,” he said. “So a lot of pro guys made the program for me. I just put the pieces together.
“I tried to reverse engineer what this pass-rush move is — the Randy White hump, the (Michael) Strahan cross chop, the (Dwight) Freeney spin. I became a student of the game, really studying a lot of film. How do I make those repeatable drills? How do we get 10,000 reps repeating that movement? Because it’s not realistic to do 10,000 1-on-1s full go. But I can repeat that movement 10,000 times so I can understand how to use my hand as a weapon.”
In January, Creamer brought a diverse knowledge base to UW — thanks to a relationship with Husky head strength and conditioning coach Ron McKeefery, who served on the Bengals’ staff in 2013. Creamer said “I respect coach McKeefery a lot. That’s honestly the biggest (reason for the move), because I didn’t know anybody else. I had never met any of the coaches here. My wife and three kids are still in Cincinnati, so it’s all the way across the country, far from home, far from any roots. I’m more of an east coast guy anyway. So it was working for people I believe in and that believe in me.”
As UW’s director of sports science, Creamer oversees the program’s training technology — like 3D cameras that track bar speed and power during lifts, or GPS devices that monitor distance, sprint speed, accelerations and decelerations throughout workouts and practices.
Of course, he’s also implementing the hand combat program he developed over a decade-plus.
“Especially at our position, we’ve taken advantage of Ben,” said UW edge coach Eric Schmidt. “We had a summer pass rush certification that we went through with our guys. We put some times for those guys to sign up, and they signed up with him. Those guys went from move to move to move to move to move and spent 15-20 minutes a day with him.
“It really sets us apart right now. We even bring recruits in and say, ‘Hey man, we’ve got a guy here that developed one of the top hand fighting instructional videos that guys are using in the NFL.’ He’s that good at that stuff. So he’s a huge resource for us and he’s helped our edge guys immensely.”
Added UW senior edge Jeremiah Martin: “Coach Ben described (the summer pass rush certification) as working up to a black belt, and once you get that black belt, every sack you get, you get a little notch on your belt.”
The ultimate goal is to add more notches. While Creamer works with each position group on specified skills, he may make the most dramatic impact on UW’s pass rushers — who managed just 20 sacks and 62 tackles for loss (both ninth in the Pac-12) in 2021.
Together, edges Zion Tupuola-Fetui, Bralen Trice, Jeremiah Martin and Sav’ell Smalls, plus interior linemen like Voi Tunuufi and Tuli Letuligasenoa, will try to add sacks with an expanded skill set.
“I feel it every day at practice,” Trice said. “Whatever set (the offensive linemen) give me, whatever hands they show me, it immediately clicks — what moves I need to use, what moves I need to work off of and counter with. It’s taken me from that initial thought process in pass rush to the secondary, ‘Oh (expletive), what do I need to counter with?’ response. He’s really helping me take that next step.”
Added Tunuufi, who tied for the team lead with three sacks as a true freshman in 2021: “Learning from his perspective, coming from combat sports and showing us how the joints work and how arms work and where the weak points are, I think that helps me a lot — especially with my technique when I’m trying to hit. He’s definitely changed my game, teaching me how to use my arms and my leverage more, being small (6-1, 258).
“Last year I was just a little freshman trying to do these little high school moves. Ben Creamer comes in and shows me all the science behind it and the reason why. So it’s been really good to learn from him and be under his wing.”
Not bad for a martial arts mechanic who weighs 175 pounds soaking wet.
“I’d be the first to say I have zero recorded NCAA sacks. But what I do provide is a perspective,” Creamer said. “When you’re working with the AJ Greens of the world — you’re working with Lamborghinis — that mechanic better know what he’s doing. I wanted to make sure I knew all the ins and outs of these X’s and O’s. I wanted to make sure I knew the ‘why’ behind every little thing that we’re doing.”