BEDMINSTER, N.J. – This time last year, Spencer Brown was officially named the director of sports performance for Rutgers football. During that time, Brown has taken control of what is a pivotal part of the program while earning a positive review from head coach Greg Schiano.
Prior to his arrival at Rutgers last spring, Brown had spent nearly a dozen years at Dartmouth. It was there in the Ivy League that he earned a reputation as a progressive and forward-thinking strength coach.
Last spring at the Greg Schiano Charity Golf Classic, the Rutgers head coach formally announced that Brown was to be elevated to his new role with the program. Now with the benefit of a full-year, Schiano sees the imprint of Brown on his program.
"I think Spencer has done a great job, and when you look at your strength and conditioning coach, he wears a lot of hats, right? So, part of it is definitely the physical development that allows players to stay healthy, but it's so much more than that.
"It's the, the bond that the team gets while they're doing all their training together, and the motivation that he provides, and I think he and I are really, really aligned in how we want to motivate our team, how we want to lead our team.
"As I told the team when we started our summer, we said (that) I want to bring Coach Brown up here, he's the head coach of the summer. And he is, right? Because he's with them more than we are, for sure. It's not even close, and I have a lot of faith in the job he's doing."
This year, now at the same backdrop of his golf classic, a relaxed Schiano seemed pleased with how Brown has stepped up.
For Rutgers, the role of Brown is an important one. As a developmental program, the strength and conditioning coach has to take the raw, incoming recruit and mold that athlete into a Big Ten football player.
The departure of Jay Butler (the previous head of strength and conditioning) came as a surprise, given that he had been with Schiano during the head coach's first stint at Rutgers as well as in the NFL with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. That Brown came in and, according to Schiano, did a seamless job last summer is something that was certainly noticeable.
"Was it really fair to throw him in there a day before the summer program started? No, but he did a great job adapting, and now when it's literally (that) he's had a chance to plan for an entire year - I've witnessed some of it, and I'm really excited," Schiano said.
"I thought we had a really good spring. We didn't have any season-ending injuries, so some of that's chance, like not all of it is prescribed. But I feel really good about where we are and where we're headed. We have a lot of really fine young players that we're developing, and part of their development is the physical part, but also there's the motivation and the kind of bond that these guys get whenever you do something really hard together. You grow closer, so you got to really, really leverage that as a strength and conditioning coach, because you have them in that environment.
"How do you get them to come together? That's something that I think he's very, very talented at."