New strength coach hopes to give Owls a needed lift
Straub’s goal is to condition the mind as well as the body
It’s daybreak when men start emerging from the darkness of dawn.
At Rice, just as on many other campuses, football players are filing in for their morning workout routine.
At 6 a.m., offensive players dressed in T-shirts and basketball shorts begin stretching ahead of their lifting session at the Brian Patterson Center. Players disperse to different stations, with the clanging of weights and chains drowning out the soft stylings of Drake. New strength and conditioning coach Hans Straub monitors the controlled chaos like a traffic guard, periodically stopping to adjust the angle of an elbow or the placement of a hand.
If coaches are the driver and players are the car, count Straub as the engine that aims to power Rice football back to Conference USA relevance.
With limited interaction allowed between players and onfield coaches during the summer, the bulk of player development temporarily falls onto Straub and his staff. And like his days at Stanford, where he helped mold gold medalists like Simone Manuel and Katie Ledecky in the pool, Straub is hoping he can keep Rice athletes healthy on the field as the rest of the staff builds them into better football players.
“He took Stanford Olympic sports to a new level,” Rice coach Mike Bloomgren said. “We’re not going to sign five-star recruits, so the strength coach and the position coaches are going to have to develop and coach these kids constantly if we’re going to get to where we want to get in three years.”
Three years ago, Straub, 38, joined the Stanford staff from Saint Leo University after a brief stint directing the strength and conditioning program at South Florida.
The son of a teacher of 37 years, Straub initially wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps as an educator (teaching math). The Carlisle, Pa., native played football at Millersville University but transferred to Towson and switched majors to kinesiology after his departing defensive line coach introduced him to the profession of being a strength coach before taking a job with the Cleveland Browns.
“At a D-II school the running backs coach did it, in high school it was the linebackers coach or the PE teacher, so I didn’t realize that it was actually a profession,” he said.
Straub interned right out of college, also working at a private training studio in a Southern California gym to make ends meet. A co-worker introduced him to the concept of better training athletes by observing them more closely in games.
“‘Watch the sport, look at how they move; then watch positions and see how they move,’ ” he was told. “‘Can you manipulate the brain to maximize what you’ve been given?’ ”
It’s that same philosophy that guides Straub’s approach at Rice.
At a school with chronic depth concerns, Bloomgren has emphasized the importance of keeping players on the field and avoiding injuries, even in younger, less developed athletes who are sometimes forced into action.
To help curb injuries, one of Straub’s goals is not solely focused on developing something like stronger calves. Instead, he supplements that work by building all of the smaller and adjoining muscles that may strain or fracture when an athlete takes contact at a certain angle. Damage can be difficult to avoid in football, but if you can strengthen muscles more comprehensively, you reduce the risk of seemingly fluke injuries.
“You can’t push too hard or too fast. We tracked injury numbers from last year and built from there,” Straub said after delineating the differences between his approach compared with that of strength coaches who may prioritize gaudy weight room numbers.
“We’re definitely behind the scenes, but we’re really heavily involved in a lot of the operations from an organizational standpoint,” he said. “We definitely spend the most time with these guys, we definitely set the pulse, and I think that we’re a major extension of coach Bloom and his vision and his philosophy.”
Part of that philosophy includes activities steeped in competition.
When offensive players leave the weight room for field activities, each agility drill is a race. Players are broken into teams and ranked based on their performance and consistency. Later, coaches will review various reps and runs to illustrate who needs work and who’s displaying ideal form and technique.
“This room doesn’t make you an All-American, but it can definitely improve what you’ve been given. … It’s so much more than just the iron; (it’s) conditioning the mind to perform at a high level,” Straub said. “There’s 72 different ways to motivate 72 different guys. Finding different ways to push each guy’s buttons and build rapport in that way is a challenge.”
To help meet such challenges, Straub typically turns to reading. His office shelves include books by spine and strength specialists; Geoffrey Colvin’s “Talent Is Overrated” and Ryan Holiday’s “Ego Is the Enemy”; publications by Urban Meyer and Bill Walsh also make an appearance.
His 8-year-old Boxer Shepherd, whose cage is situated in the corner of his office, probably helps connect with players, too.
“I’m working to help change the legacy at Rice,” Straub said.
“Five or six years from now, if we have tremendous success at Rice, I’m hopeful that someone will say, ‘Hey, that success was built on the shoulders of a guy like Brady Wright, a guy like Parker Hanusa,’ guys who were part of that inaugural season that helped to hopefully rebuild the foundation of Rice football,” he said. “Maybe they won’t have that 13-0 season, but they were a part of starting the process over.”