Madison Revving Up For Kickoff Under First-Year Strength Coach

He’s in the middle of doing all the necessary maintenance he started in late May and won’t be done until he turns the keys over to James Madison football coach Curt Cignetti, who will begin leading the excursion at the end of the month when players report for August training camp.

“That’s the analogy I gave the guys at the beginning of the summer,” Phillips, JMU’s first-year strength and conditioning coach, said. “I showed ‘em the gas tank, the engine and the horsepower to give ‘em a vision.”

The analogy aligns because Phillips breaks his eight-week preparation plan for the Dukes into three parts so that they’re fully ready for next month’s grueling practices and a season — kicking off on Aug. 31 at West Virginia — that could last as many as 17 games depending on whether or not JMU plays in the first round of the postseason or reaches the FCS national title game.

“The first two weeks of the summer we created a really big gas tank,” he said. “We wanted to be the most efficient machine we could possibly be, so we did a lot of work-capacity things with more volume.

“But right now, we’re in phase two, and the whole purpose of this is to build our engine. That’s getting us as strong as we can get in the weight room, and then on the field it’s really trying to develop high quality ways of acceleration while then also pairing it with change of direction, team runs and team competition on Fridays.”

Cignetti, who hired Phillips a second time this past December after initially hiring him at Elon in 2017, said Phillips is “cutting edge” because of the emphasis he puts on flexibility, explosion and injury prevention. Phillips said everything he requires players to do within a workout must translate to helping the athlete do something on the field.

“It’s not just about how much weight you can lift,” Cignetti said. “Brian develops speed, quickness and the ability to also accelerate. And football is a stop-start game, so it’s football-specific on his end and we see great results.”

Dukes fifth-year senior cornerback Rashad Robinson said the players trust Phillips because he knows how to explain what he teaches and can connect with them as well.

“The thing about him is he’s got tons of energy,” Robinson said. “He’s the one jumping around and pushing us around, giving us energy and he’s a ball of energy, but it’s good for the guys to see that he brings it every morning. There isn’t one morning where he hasn’t given us a motivational talk or tried to pump us up.”

And that’s because Phillips said his big-picture theme for the summer is validation. Unlike his recent previous stops at Massachusetts, Elon, Army and Idaho, the expectation — fairly or unfairly — for the Dukes is to reach the national championship game.

Athlon Sports tabbed JMU as the No. 2 team in its preseason poll and Hero Sports put the Dukes at No. 1. Seven different players, including Robinson, have been named preseason All-Americans.

“What I tell these guys is it’s on us on the inside to confirm and validate who we are and who we’re supposed to be,” Phillips said. “That’s what I think the summertime has started as. We’re trying to validate everything that we do. We want to prove we’re the best team and we want to prove why we have the No. 1 ranking.”

Phillips even admitted it’s different for him to be at a place with such lofty expectations, but that his time with Army prepared him for any job. Phillips got to West Point as part of Jeff Monken’s first staff and stayed there for three years as the Black Knights transformed from a team finishing 4-8 and 2-10 to one finishing 8-5 with a win over Navy and a Heart of Dallas Bowl victory.

“When I got the Elon job, he was a big hire for me,” Cignetti said. “I try to pay that guy well and maybe more than some other people so we can attract the best person we can. But I talked to about 10 candidates when I was down at Elon, and Brian separated himself from everyone else with his knowledge, his passion and it was also appealing to me that he had gone into Army on the ground floor when they were struggling with a new head coach and then turned that thing around.

“It was going to be a similar situation at Elon, where it was going to have to be turned around, so I thought he had been through a situation like that before and that it’d be a great fit.”

Phillips said one way a team can achieve its end goal, whether that squad tries for a national championship or just to finish above .500, is for the players on that team to stay healthy. And as Robinson, who missed all of last year with turf toe, and the Dukes can attest, those season-ending injuries to standouts, starters and important second-stringers over the past few falls have hurt JMU’s chances at winning back-to-back national championships or even have an extended stay in the postseason last year.

“The biggest thing is always injuries,” senior center Mac Patrick said. “When you’re losing four, five key guys, it’s hard to make that big run. Other guys are already banged up anyway, so I guess the team that’s most healthy really will make the run to the [national championship].”

Patrick and Robinson said they both appreciate Phillips’ methods for preventing injuries.

“We start every session with what we call movement preparation,” Phillips said. “Every day that’ll be different based on what that day is. So if it’s an upper body day in the weight room, it’ll be designed around upper body or then if it’s speed work, we’ll have a linear or lateral one because there’s a warm-up for that. So there are a lot of movement preparations for the daily needs.

“It’s not just one, ‘Let’s just do jumping jacks and we’re warmed up.’ We don’t do it that way. We prepare the joints for those days and there are a couple of major joints — the ankle, knee, hip and shoulder — that are our four main areas we try to make sure are properly prepared.”

Phillips and JMU players have a few days off this week for the Fourth of July, and then will finish with three weeks of the final phase in the strength coach’s plan before transitioning into training camp.

“So by this point we’ve accomplished a really efficient fuel tank, a great engine and now we want to add horsepower to it,” Phillips said. “We want to get as powerful, as fast and then as explosive as possible.”