Football is unique for many reasons, but it may be the only sport in which you have only 14 possible competitions to highlight what you have done and the strides you have made personally and collectively over the previous six months of training. The words Performance Lab speak to what our facility is at its core. It is a laboratory to improve our performance in our sport and throughout competition. More importantly, however, it is a laboratory that is responsible for personal and group mental and physical change beyond our performance on the field. The Performance Lab itself is a microcosm of life. The lessons learned in the Lab can be carried over and applied to all aspects of life.

First, the Performance Lab much like life can be unforgiving. It doesn't care what kind of day you had or how you feel. It will not care if you slept enough, how sore you are, or whether you want to be there or not.  The weight will always be the weight and the work will still need to be done. If you choose to move the weight you will see progress. If you choose not to, it will give you nothing back in return. The more you show up and put in the work the more you will see change. Unlike other areas in life specifically that which is at our fingertips, the weight room does not provide instant gratification. The weight room teaches consistency and discipline through frequency. There are too many instances in life where people look for short cuts or off ramps from having to subject themselves to hard, consistent work. If you take these shortcuts and do not commit to the Performance Lab it will haunt you and haunt your team. 

Second, the Performance Lab is where you learn to fail and how to respond or succeed and never settle. To often in life people fall into hardship or are struck with some bad luck or setbacks. Unfortunately all to often people struggle to rebound from these moments. The Lab teaches to recommit, reassess, and restructure your goals in real time. If you fail at lifting a weight or can't finish a set, you have two options, quit and cheat yourself or reassess, reattempt, or restructure your plan to finish the set. You may have failed at your present goal but you didn't make it deter you from the reaching the end result of finishing the set and committing to finishing the work. On the opposite end of the spectrum, people who have succeeded or have hit goals may find themselves in a sense of complacency. In the Lab we preach progress not goal attainment. Reaching short term or long term goals in the Lab are just bench marks on our way towards continual progress.

Lastly, the Performance Lab is where we can go better our minds. Physical activity has been indicated in hundreds if not thousands of scholarly articles as a decisive way to help minimize or eliminate stress and anxiety. Movement is medicine. As we tell our athletes all the time the Performance Lab is a place where for an hour in a half you can forget about everything else going on in your life. You can take out as much aggression, anger, etc. that you need to with no fear of negative consequence. Not to mention there are upwards of 70-80 players and coaches there to help you in your times of need to lean on.

Make no mistake, our time in the Performance Lab is not all work and no play. We compete in individual and team competitions/games throughout the week. These times are earned through our hard, consistent work from the week before. We have committed ourselves to competing in everything we do. Sometimes that competition is against ourselves or our minds individually and sometimes it is competition against our own teammates.

The off-season has and will always set the stage for the season. WE ARE COMMITTED and the JOB'S NOT FINISHED!

-Coach Marshall

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