Chuck Hulwadell on Wasting Technology, Owning Mistakes, and Coaching the Athlete in Front of You I sat down with Kansas's Chuck Hulwadell for a conversation about the battle against Big S&C. Chuck walks through his path from Colorado to KU, his first job as the only strength coach for over 600 athletes at Benedictine College, and what that taught him. Then he gets candid about the year he let technology do his coaching and what he would do differently. I add my own story of building an OmegaWave-based decision tree that taught me a similar lesson. Key takeaways • Chuck started out on the PT route at the University of Kansas, did a couple of PT clinic internships, and realized it wasn't for him. Research was next, including time with Dr. Andy Fry, but lab work wasn't the right setting either. A sports performance internship at a private facility is where he fell in love with strength and conditioning. • His first job offer came out of an internship at Benedictine College, a small NAIA school. He became the first director of athletic performance there and says he had no idea what he was doing. • He was the only strength coach for over 600 athletes at Benedictine. The volume of reps let him try a lot of things and figure out fast what would not work. • Early at KU, right after earning his CSCS, he had 80 football players and 10 racks in less space than recommended, and then women's lacrosse arrived. Out of that he learned to project his voice, communicate differently across sports and athletes, manage 20 head coaches, program across seasons, and coach the same movement in different ways. He also learned to take failure on the chin, and he wouldn't trade the experience. • Force plates can be useful, but if all you use them for is jump height, you may be wasting money. A metric has to help you understand the athlete and enhance performance. • Chuck has made every decision based on technology, and he says it made him a worse, lazier coach because he let it do the coaching. He admits he flooded his work with technology and feels bad that he may have wasted a year of athletes' careers. • A force-plate score down 25% might mean the athlete stayed up until 3 a.m. and didn't try, not that training is the problem. Some athletes don't try hard, others keep adapting, and constant changes or backing off may be unnecessary. • Chuck says not to overrule experienced head coaches over tiny percentage changes. He works with a coach who uses GPS history to check whether practice is approaching the load needed for a coming 20-hour week, instead of reacting to an insignificant fraction. The goal is preparing athletes for sport and influencing wins and losses. • People chase the what and how, copying programs and social posts, and neglect the why. Chuck adapts principles from Louie Simmons and Westside to team sports rather than copying methods wholesale, especially for a 7-foot-2 center. He passed along Dr. Ramsey Nijem's warning against lazy thinking: chasing a new tool without understanding why can harm athletes and a coach's career. • Chuck urges coaches to audit their coaching, programming, and interactions to find weak points, not for false humility or self-promotion. For some athletes, college sports may be the best experience they get, and strength coaches are there to serve them. For a future guest, Chuck recommends his coworker Stuart Young, whom he calls brilliant and underrated. He also named Joe Pedulla and Ramsey Nijem.
