Iowa Hawkeyes' Strength And Conditioning Coach Knows What Really Matters

The strength and conditioning program at Iowa is easily one of the most successful in all of college football. There's no program in the country that takes unerrecruited 3-star players and turns them into legitimate NFL prospects like Iowa does. Yes, Kirk Ferentz deserves a ton of the credit for that, but his S&C program is a big part of that transformation.

Like everything at Iowa, so is consistency.

Raimond Braithwaite has been in charge of Iowa's strength and conditioning since 2020 and he's been with the program for over two decades. He was the top assistant to former strength and conditioning coach Chris Doyle for many years.

They do it right at Iowa, and Braithwaite recently explained some of the program's secrets to Chad Leistikow of Hawk Central. Part of his secret sauce is developing a real relationship with Iowa's newcomers from the get-go. It's not just about putting up weights. It's about the connection for Braithwaite.

“It's more a get-to-know-you meeting. Where’d you grow up? Tell me about your parents. Your favorite food. Do you have any pets?” Braithwaite said of his first interactions with incoming freshmen. “And then I flip the script, and I let them run the meeting. ‘Hey, ask me anything you want to know about me,’ just to take the veil off (from) the head strength coach."

Braithwaite also seems to understand that at the end of the day, college football is a big business. Sure, in the offseason it's fun to watch videos that come out of Iowa's weight room and plenty of Hawkeyes have been able to put up some big numbers over the years thanks to the S&C program.

Ultimately, though, the business of college football demands that a program wins in order to stay relevant, so everything that Braithwaite does has to revolve around making sure the Hawkeyes are ready to compete on the field.

Numbers are numbers, but the most important number is the amount of wins.

“The numbers are a motivating factor, but what's really important is what we do on the football field,” Braithwaite said. “On gamedays, no one cares about how much you bench or what your clean is.”

It's a formula that works in Iowa City.