When head coach Mike Locksley took over the Maryland program back in December of 2018, the program was on the cusp of significant roster and culture overhauls. A big piece in facilitating that change inside the program starts with the director of football strength and conditioning Ryan Davis, who joined the program back in January of 2019.
After owning his own company in the trucking industry, Davis began his strength and conditioning career with an internship at Rowan University where it took time before he became comfortable. “I was afraid to do anything with the athletes except freaking lunge them,” Davis joked. Davis went on to work at West Florida then Alabama before stints at Samford and Colorado State and a return to the Crimson Tide, but as he reflects on his first four years in College Park, he acknowledges just how hard it was to revamp the program.
“This is the hardest thing I've ever done from when we started,” Davis said.
Maryland underwent significant roster turnover back in 2019 into 2020 as Locksley and company worked to fill the key pieces on the roster. The COVID-season back in 2020 only added to the stress and pressure that comes with a college football season, but as Davis looks ahead to the 2022 Terrapins, the improved team culture and mental focus is hard to ignore.
“This required every ounce of what I had and what this staff had to be able to get us and move us in the direction that coach has been able to move us in. Coach Locksley has been unbelievable in terms of supporting me in knowing that we're gonna put you in a really challenging situation. He never hid that, he never tried to hide that from me. We talked very openly about things that we needed to do, but the attractive part of the job was, number one, I felt like my coaching style was a fit for the players that were here. And then number two, Locks was setting his vision off of an experience that I also had so like, he didn't need to sell me on the vision.”
After Davis arrived in College Park, his first step wasn’t to install immediate change but rather win the support and trust from everyone in and around the program. “We had to come in and we had to earn the player’s trust, we had to earn their respect, but it wasn't just the players. It was everybody. You know, it was the administration, it was the fans, it was everybody. This group of guys that we still have on this roster that has been through some of those things, to where we are now like if you had told me that first year that I’d be completing the offseason in year four and if you had to tangibly told me that we'd be seeing some of the stuff that we're seeing in year four, I would have told you that you're lying to me. I would have said it's gonna take us at least five or six years to even sniff any of that but that's a credit, from my perspective, that's a credit to the players, and how they bought into the process and that's a credit for Locks to clearly be able to share his vision and finding the right people that wanted to be a part of this to get the organization where we all know it can be.”
Maryland’s renewed and improved offseason program is made possible with the Jones-Hill House, the football team’s dedicated practice facility that was unveiled in June of 2021. Inside includes a 24,000 square foot weight room with 22 custom weight racks that includes Perch video technology, serving as a coach’s eye to capture reps and speed of movement. One unique aspect is the custom design on Maryland’s weight racks and dumbbells. “Rogue has been able to design all of our custom racks, so they don’t exist anywhere,” Davis added. “The dumbbells were done custom through a company Alico out of Sweden, so we were able to put this room together for what we do with Maryland football facility.” Davis added that Maryland has installed enhancements in their racks as vendors “have been unbelievable and just keeping up, being able to update the software,” but there’s another aspect of the weight room that Davis champions.
“I tell people when they come in, 25,000 square feet, we don't have a single pillar in the room. There's not any single thing that obstructs the view for the head strength coach in this space, which is, it's kind of an architectural anomaly in our field to start with.” The Jones-Hill House also includes a players’ lounge, barbershop, 196-person auditorium, recording studio, 10,000 square foot dining area, and a recording studio, all perks that keeps the players routinely inside the team facilities. “They’re always in here,” Davis added. But the technology in the Terps’ new weight room, four times the size of the replaced weight room, has provided instant gratification through year one of the new facility.
“The first thing from my perspective, as a strength coach, what it's done for our toolboxes, it's allowed us to really do whatever we have to with the players. You know, where we started at, you're really limited in how you can train them and what you can do because of the size, the equipment that was available but now, you're able to do anything in here and it wouldn't matter if it was me or somebody else sitting in this chair, they're going to tell you the same thing like that. This space allows you to really train the team and prepare them the exact way that you want to, so it expands the toolbox.”
Jones-Hill House also gives Maryland an edge on the recruiting trail. “From a recruiting standpoint, it's been one of the greatest things for us because the first thing players will tell me is they'll be like coach, I went to this school or I went to that school like they didn't have this, this place is unbelievable. Well, we know that we put together one of the best facilities in the country.”
Davis called the Perch video technology in all the Terps’ 22 weight racks “probably the single greatest thing that's had an impact in our program” due to the added ability to provide instant feedback. “Now they're not looking at you as the coach to tell them whether it was a good rep or a bad rep. You know, they have instant feedback right there. The other thing is you can't cheat reps with it. Everything's counted and it comes right up on the screen of what they did. So that's been really good and it's fun seeing the older guys take ownership of that with some of the new guys coming into the program.”
While at Samford, Davis implemented the ‘Fourth Quarter’ offseason program that had a lasting impact on the Bulldogs’ program. Davis and Locksley tweaked and applied that training program to bring it to College Park, calling it ‘Terp Time’ as the offseason conditioning program carries the Terps into spring practice. A big reason why Davis and Locksley were able to adjust the offseason program back in 2019 was due to Locksley’s familiarity with the type of talent he’d recruit to College Park. “If you think about that, like, he saw the blueprint and kind of what he wanted it to look like, right, but he was putting that together because he already had 12 years of history in this program. He knew the types of players we were going to recruit, he knew what the administration was like, he knew everything about the facilities, he knew everything about what he wanted to put with the support staff. So, this guy was able to be at a place and say, ‘you know what, when I get my opportunity here, this is exactly how I want it to look,’” Davis added.
While Maryland enjoys the additional resources and support surrounding its strength and conditioning, the additional data at the disposal of the strength staff allows Maryland to analyze the performance and analytics of players through workouts. The program announced the hire of Sam Contorno as coordinator of sports science on Tuesday, an area that she’ll oversee. “The way this thing has changed since I started in this, we track everything. We track everything a guy's doing. And so, in here, it tracks on the perch, you know, we measure force absorption and force production rates on the force plates in here. We have the clear sky system in the indoor here. So, we can literally measure the live workload of what players are doing. Everything we do in the summer, you know, we're tracking with live speeds.”
That’s helped Maryland adjust even the type of information analyzed. While fans take note of the 40-yard dash, the event that both Nick Cross and Chigoziem Okonkwo dominated at last week’s NFL Combine, Davis notes there are other metrics that might tell a complete story to a player’s speed.
“You notice the shift in football in general because scouts don't ask me a whole lot anymore about a guy's 40 time. They ask me what his miles per hour are, what is accelerations are, you know, because I think all 32 teams in the NFL now have the analytics where they're looking at the same things. When I started in this, that's kind of archaic right now in our field in terms of the training. So, Jones-Hill House, I think is one of the elite facilities in the country and I think from a functionality standpoint, with the space holistically, you'd be hard-pressed to find a facility better than this one. You really would.”
Arguably one of the biggest fan questions is when a freshman enrolls, how a potential four-year development looks given the transfer portal in college football. Davis added “things don’t stay the same and they’re always changing,” but the message in attacking the development plan is now tweaked. “The way the transfer portal is right now, the big thing we say is that like, now, we're not trying to take you from where you are to where you want to go. We're trying to partner with you to help you get there. I can be a valuable asset to you, to your brand.” But with eight midyear enrollees along with a pair of transfer additions now with the program this semester, Davis reveals what advice the underclassmen get to mentally adjust to the pace of college football.
“I think we're going into the week three and I pulled [Gavin Gibson] aside. And I said, listen, don't look at the schedule for the week. Don't even look at the schedule for the day. When you get up in the morning, look at what you have, right? And make that be the last time. You have to start to be able to shift your focus so that when you're in class, you're in class. You can't be worried about Terp Time at three o'clock when you're sitting in class. When you come to train, just worry about this, then we're going to help you, we're going to guide you along. If I can get you to be that one dimensional at the start where you're just thinking about what you have in front of you, because I said Gavin when we're done training, we're going to walk you into the training room and now I need you to think about recovery, right? When you go to Terp time, I'm going to shrink it down even more and I'm going to say just worry about this rep. And I'll remind them if we're in stations or we're in middle drill, and I'll be like hey, it's just this one rep. That's all it is. Because it's so easy if you look at it holistically, and it's your first time, you become overwhelmed, you know, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, now you're just making things harder for yourself. And so, I think what Gavin has done really well, is over time, he's been able to really dissect things and say, alright, I can focus on this. And then I'll tell the guys, hey, the physical stuff is all great, we're going to get you in shape, we're going to get you bigger, stronger, faster. If we couldn't do that, we wouldn't be in the job in the first place but the bigger part of what will carry over like from that piece with Terp Time is, I said Gavin for your position, it’s going to teach you how to have a short memory.”
With spring practice just 20 days away, Locksley has reiterated that a bowl game to close the 2021 season was an achievement but moving forward, it’s the expectation and Davis added that’s how the Terps have trained with spring ball looming.
“They're not happy with it. It’s enough to where you have the buy-in to coach’s process but it's also enough where it keeps that edge on their shoulder to say, we're not doing all this just to get there. You know, we were really grateful to be in that game. I thought the Pinstripe, the New York Yankees do an unbelievable job with hosting and taking care of their teams and I don't want it to sound disrespectful to them, but our guys this year have been working like they know their ceilings higher than that. And so, I just, I love the attitude of the team, I love the edge that this group has to them, and we are more of a team now. We are more of a team than anything, in my opinion, since we've been here. So just watching that group grow as close as they've been growing, like look, those are the pieces that are going to carry over to the field on Saturday. And, you know, they're not going to turn down work. They're not going to try to find a way out. They're going to try to find a way through and I think that's also been something that I've been really proud of them for, but I told them that they ought to be really proud for themselves that they've kind of developed this mindset and mentality the way they've been going to work. You know, we say right now like we constantly tell these guys all the time that like look, sometimes you gotta suffer in times of peace so you don't bleed in times of war. And they like, you know, they kind of hold on to that and they go to work with that edge every day. So honestly, it's felt like I've taken a new job because it feels like a new team, and it feels like in a new space. And so, it's really, we've had a lot of fun, but they've been pretty unbelievable this offseason.”