It wasn’t long after Pat Byrd was hired as head football coach at Winston Academy that Sean Greer was getting ready to set the foundation for the team’s strength and conditioning program
Greer calls Winston county home and his training efforts were being noticed around the Golden Triangle. Oak Hill Academy was interested in hiring Greer to do its weight program and the same day Winston approached him about doing the same. The choice was easy. He was going to WA.
Byrd knew Greer well enough to know what to expect of him. He trusted him with his kids in the weight room without a question.
“I knew he would work, I knew he was a good man and I knew that he knew the kids well,” Byrd said of Greer. “I gave him free rein which is outside of my comfort zone. It’s paid off in a big way.”
After two years, WA’s football team has had 97% of the players increase weight gains of 40 or more pounds in lifts. It’s not just the football team that is seeing the benefits of hard work, though, it’s every sport.
Greer has helped transform the entire athletic department. After years of unorganized training in other sports or no weight training at all, Greer is establishing structure from football to girls basketball.
“Most sports all have the same base. You need to have strength and once you have strength you create power and with power comes speed,” Greer said. “The base program works with everybody. More and more strength coaches in the realm of college, NFL and NBA they’re all seeing that the body works as one unit. We do all the common stuff, but work the whole body.”
Thanks to donors and people around the school, there’s been an investment from those that are looking to make the weight program a priority. The weight room has gotten a face life over the last two years with new racks, mats and the implementation of tsunami bars.
The tsunami bar is a fairly new concept in weight lifting and is a flexible bar and weight that bends. It’s proven to be a safe alternative to regular weights while improving the explosiveness of players.
Byrd has seen the implementation of the weight room and the weights pay off on sports around the school. Most importantly, he’s seen Greer make all the difference.
“When you feel stronger, you are stronger. You can tell a big difference in every sport,” Byrd said. “With him, it’s a mentality as much as everything else. He coaches the girls seventh-grade basketball players as hard as he coaches the football players. He pushes you.”
Greer loves his job and working with kids to make them better players, but it’s also given him a boost over the last year that he now works with his wife alongside him.
Kelley is the girls basketball coach at WA and coming off of her first season as the Lady Patriots’ head coach. Greer said that he’s enjoyed working hand-in-hand with Kelley to help push her program to be all that it could be.
“That’s been the biggest blessing. We’ve always worked out together. She loves the girls getting in there because when she played, they didn’t really have a weight program,” Greer said. “Her knowing the benefits of what these girls are getting, she loves it. We know that we can have a program that’s going to be top of the line and the best of the best when it comes to being conditioned.”
While Greer is doing everything he can to push the athletes across the board to be able to compete at the highest level, he says he’s getting reinforcement from the coaches.
Everyone at WA is getting on the same page at what’s best for the students and they’re pushing forward as a department to get to the next level. While it might not yet be visible in championships and wins and losses, the foundation is being laid and Greer is right in the middle of it.
“All the coaches have really worked hard and helped me, but they kind of let me do what I want to do,” Greer said. “We all work together and that’s the blessing of it. They watch the kid sand motivate the kids when we’re in the weight room and they help out.”
