One of the things that allowed UVa to win a national championship this season was certainly the experience that the Cavaliers brought to the postseason. But so too was the way that they were able to play big minutes without much drop-off in their stamina and execution.
Much of that can be attributed to the fine tuning strength and conditioning coach Mike Curtis and head coach Tony Bennett have done with the program over the years.
In the second half of our conversation with Curtis, we talk about how they were able to avoid that wear and tear as well as the obvious S&C question when it comes to UVa and next season.
It seemed like throughout the season, especially in the tournament, the players have been able to play a lot of minutes and not only looked fresh in the clutch but they’ve been especially good. What would you attribute some of that to this year? Is there a trend there or is much of that because of the amount of experience that was present on this team?
Well, with each year you hope that the capacity and robustness of these guys will work and expand and grow larger. I think that’s a product but I also think that our staff is continually trying to learn from where we have I don’t want to necessarily say made mistakes but where we could have been better and had the smallest of marginal gains. I think that we’ve adjusted as we’ve looked back in retrospect at the things that we’ve done in the past and said ‘Well, we could tweak this and make this better. This weekly layout, the structure, this practice content, could possibly be different in order to facilitate more recovery.’ I think that we’ve constantly tried to do that and go through that process of making sure that we’re doing what we can to make sure that they’re optimally ready on game nights. I think this year maybe is a reflection of a little bit of both of those things: A little bit older group with more robustness because obviously the summers, what we try to do is continue to stack those things on year to year. But during the season we’ve also been able to take a few more days off. We’ve been able to tweak practices, tweak duration, tweak those things so that it was more representative of their acute level of readiness so that they could recover better.
And lastly, Jay Huff is a player that we’ve talked about in the past. With the injury he suffered last March, it obviously hindered his physical development because he wasn’t able to have the offseason that he or you had planned. Now with that behind him, what’s he need to do and what sort of work do you think is ahead of him?
So, obviously he lost those eight to 12 weeks during the summer where we wanted to gain some upper-extremity strength, so it was a little bit compromising. We did a fair amount of work in terms of lower-extremity strength but to tie it all in in terms of upper-extremity strength, core strength, some of those things in ways that we could have gone about it, we were not necessarily able to do in the most optimal way. I think this summer will be critical for him. I think that another 10 to 15 pounds while maintaining all the athletic qualities that he possesses will be paramount for us. But I think we will be able to do that just simply because he has made that change in terms of adhering to what we call key performance indicators. So we lay those things out and one of the environmental things for him is making sure he adheres to a nutritional program and he’s been more adherent to that. So if we can continue that growth in addition to what we’ll be able to do from a training perspective, I think we’ll meet our objectives and hopefully that will pump more confidence in him and more ‘go get it’-ness into him and you’ll see an aggressive Jay Huff that is much more of the player that I think is the higher ceiling that he has.
JOIN CAVSCORNER TODAY!
If you are not already a member of CavsCorner, come join us and see what all of the buzz is about.
Click HERE to subscribe and get all of the latest news and join hundreds of other UVa fans in talking about Cavalier football, basketball, and recruiting. You won't be disappointed!
