Joe Kenn has been coaching strength and conditioning since 1987 and has coached from the high school level all the way to the professionals. We asked him what all that technology changed and the answer came back smaller than you would expect. It gave coaches one more layer of information. The rest of the job is still coaching, and he is blunt about what happens when people forget that.
1. Briefly share your background.
I’ve been in the strength and conditioning profession for five decades, from 1987 to the present, and I’ve been fortunate to experience this profession at just about every level. I was a college football player at Wake Forest before getting into coaching, and my career has taken me through the high school level, multiple collegiate programs including Boise State, Utah, Arizona State, and Louisville, and ultimately the NFL with the Carolina Panthers from 2011 through 2019.
During my nine seasons with Carolina, we went to the playoffs four times, won three NFC South championships, won an NFC Championship, and played in Super Bowl 50. Throughout my career, I’ve also been fortunate to develop and share training concepts such as the Tier System and Integrated Concurrent training. Today, a lot of my work is centered around education, mentoring coaches, and continuing to challenge my own ideas about how we can better prepare athletes.
2. You've built programs at the high school, collegiate, and NFL level. What actually changes about the job as you move up levels, and what stays exactly the same no matter who you're coaching?
The biggest thing that changes is the environment around the athlete. As you move from high school to college to the NFL, the resources increase, the staffs become larger and more specialized, the technology becomes more sophisticated, and the consequences of every decision become greater. At the NFL level, you're dealing with professional athletes whose bodies are their livelihood. Availability becomes one of the most important performance qualities you can have.
What doesn't change is coaching. You still have to build relationships, earn trust, and, especially with elementary, middle, and high school athletes, build confidence. You have to teach them how to train, create an environment where they want to work, and help them believe in what they are capable of accomplishing. The goal is to develop confident athletes who understand that progress comes from consistent effort and learning. A barbell still weighs what it weighs whether you're in a high school weight room or an NFL facility.
I think sometimes people assume that coaching professional athletes requires some secret advanced training system. It doesn't. The sophistication is often in knowing when to push, when to pull back, and how to individualize within the structure of the program. The principles remain remarkably consistent. The application is what changes.
3. Is there a piece of your coaching philosophy that you had to unlearn or adjust once you got to the NFL, something that worked at the college level but didn't translate?
Before NIL and the transfer portal, you had athletes for multiple years, which gave you the opportunity to build them physically and develop them over time. You could teach them how to train while developing strength, power, work capacity, movement competency, and confidence.
In the NFL, the competitive calendar and the athlete's training age completely change the equation. You're dealing with players who may have been training seriously for ten or fifteen years, and they are playing a much longer season against the best athletes in the world. I had to become even more aware of the optimal effective dose, which led to the creation of our Small Doses of Excellence programs for our most tenured veterans. More isn't automatically better.
That reinforced something that has become increasingly important in my coaching philosophy: the program serves the athlete. The athlete doesn't serve the program. My philosophy has always been Absorb, Modify, Apply, and the NFL forced me to become even better at the modify and apply parts of that equation.
4. What did strength coaching look like before that data was available, and what's the biggest thing it changed about how you actually make decisions?
We coached.
We watched athletes train. We talked to them. We watched how they walked into the room. We watched bar speed with our eyes. We knew their personalities and understood when somebody was ready to go and when something wasn't right. We used percentages, repetition maximums, training logs, conversations, and our experience to make decisions.
The technology didn't eliminate any of those things. What it did was give us another layer of information.
I started working with velocity-based technology in the early 2000s at Arizona State with the Tendo Power Analyzer. Initially, I wasn't using velocity to tell me what weight somebody should lift. I was using it to validate something I was already coaching: intent. Were you trying to move the bar as explosively as possible?
That's eventually become a major part of my PIVoT philosophy. The number should help me become a better coach. It shouldn't replace my ability to coach. We collect the number to better coach the athlete. We don't continually change the athlete's training just to make the number look better.
5. With how much technology has entered the field, where do you think it has genuinely made athletes better, and where do you think coaches lean on it as a crutch?
Technology is incredibly valuable when it gives us information that our eyes can't accurately quantify. Velocity, GPS, player load, high-speed running, acceleration and deceleration, force production, sleep and wellness information can all help us see trends and ask better questions.
Where we get into trouble is when the technology becomes the coach.
A dashboard can tell me that an athlete's number changed. It can't always tell me why. That's where the relationship becomes critical. Maybe he didn't sleep. Maybe something happened at home. Maybe he's sore. Maybe he's frustrated about playing time. Maybe the number looks bad and he actually feels fantastic.
The data tells part of the story. The athlete tells the real story.
Technology should create better conversations and better coaching decisions. When coaches start staring at screens instead of watching athletes train, we've probably gone too far.
6. At the high school and youth level there's a lot less access to the kind of tech and analytics you had in the NFL. How do you translate what you learned at the pro level down to programs that don't have those resources?
You'd be surprised by how much technology has entered the high school level. Personally, I think it's become a little too much in some programs. This is where I think people can overcomplicate things. You don't need an NFL budget to apply NFL-level coaching principles.
You can monitor intent without a velocity device. You can teach athletes what an explosive repetition should look and feel like. You can track attendance, loads, repetitions, performance, bodyweight, jumps, sprints, and simple testing measures. Most importantly, you can know your athletes.
At the high school level, I would put an enormous emphasis on teaching. That's a major reason I developed the Block Zero concept. Before we're worried about sophisticated monitoring, let's teach young athletes how to squat, hinge, push, pull, brace, jump, land, sprint, and control their bodies. Let's teach them how to train.
Some of the most valuable things I learned in the NFL don't cost anything: communication, organization, consistency, individualization, understanding training age, and knowing when enough is enough. Technology can enhance those principles, but it doesn't create them.
7. Do you see a generational split in how younger coaches coming up now relate to data and technology versus coaches who came up the way you did?
Absolutely, but I don't necessarily see that as a negative. Younger coaches have grown up with technology and have access to information that we couldn't have imagined when I started coaching. They can pull up research, watch presentations from coaches around the world, collect training data, and communicate with experts almost instantly.
The danger is confusing access to information with experience.
A young coach may understand a dashboard better than I do, but experience teaches you context. After you've watched thousands upon thousands of training sessions, patterns start to mean something different. That's something you can't download.
I think the best future staffs will combine both generations. Give me the young coach who understands the technology, asks great questions, and wants to learn, and combine that with the experienced coach who understands people, context, and pattern recognition. Now we've got something powerful. I've always believed in Absorb, Modify, Apply. That applies to coaches too.
8. If you had to guess, what's the next piece of technology or data that's going to actually change strength and conditioning in the next five to ten years and what do you think is overhyped right now?
I think the next major advancement is going to be less about collecting more data and more about connecting the data we already have. We have GPS data, velocity data, force plate data, sleep data, wellness information, training loads, practice loads, medical information, and competition data. The challenge is turning all of that into something a coach can actually use.
Artificial intelligence will probably play a major role in identifying patterns across those different data streams. But even there, I would give the same warning: information isn't a decision. The coach still has to interpret it within the context of the athlete.
What I think is overhyped is the idea that we can perfectly predict human performance or injury from a dashboard. Athletes aren't algorithms. Human performance has too many variables, and sometimes we create an illusion of precision because we have a lot of numbers.
I'm interested in anything that helps me ask a better question. I'm skeptical of anything that claims it can eliminate the need for the coach.
9. What has your favorite sports moment been? Either one you participated in, attended or watched.
There are some obvious possibilities from my career. Winning the NFC Championship with the Carolina Panthers and earning the opportunity to coach in Super Bowl 50 would certainly be near the top. There is something special about standing on that field after an NFC Championship and realizing that a group of players and coaches you've spent an entire season working alongside is going to the Super Bowl.
But after almost four decades in coaching, some of my favorite moments aren't necessarily the ones with trophies attached to them. They include watching my oldest son, Joe, play high school football at a high level and accomplish his goal of earning a Division I football scholarship. They include watching my youngest son, Peter, excel in track and field, earn his way as a walk-on at a Division I program, receive a full scholarship by his senior year, and ultimately finish on the podium in the hammer throw at the Sun Belt Championships.
I’m also proud of watching my wife accomplish her goal of swimming continuously for two hours after taking up swimming. I love watching my granddaughter play volleyball, and now I’m enjoying teaching my grandson the Block Zero concept and seeing his interest in training begin to develop.
Those moments mean as much to me as anything I experienced professionally. They're about watching people work toward something, stay committed, and accomplish a goal that may have once seemed out of reach. That's also what makes coaching so rewarding: seeing athletes accomplish something they weren't sure they could accomplish, seeing former players become successful husbands, fathers, coaches, and professionals, and hearing from somebody years later that something we did together made an impact on their life.
That's probably how I define a great sports moment now. The championships are incredible, but the relationships and the people you help develop last a lot longer than the scoreboard.
The Game Behind the Game
Reading an athlete well enough to know what the numbers left out is the skill Joe Kenn spent five decades sharpening. The barbell was always the easy part. His warning travels past the weight room, too. A dashboard tells you what changed and never why, and once the screen starts doing the coaching, whatever made the program work is already gone.
The same holds off the platform. Hours spent wrestling schedules, rosters, registrations, and gym assignments are hours nobody spends teaching a kid how to hinge. Good club operations and tournament operations technology clears that work off the calendar so the people running programs can get back to the part of the job that actually requires them. Collect the number to better coach the athlete, as Kenn puts it. That's a fair bar to hold any technology in this space too.
About Top of the 9th
Top of the 9th is a Fastbreak AI original series featuring the athletes, organizers, and operators who make sports exceptional. Fastbreak AI powers collegiate conferences and professional leagues with Fastbreak Pro Schedule.
