Inside The Huskies

New UW Weight Coach Tries to Lift Spirits, Football Performance Levels

Ron McKeefery regularly posts videos and photos to let the public see what's going on.

Dan Raley

Ron McKeefery is the guy with the crewcut and personality, holding court in the University of Washington weight room and imploring football players to push just a little more in their winter conditioning.

The new strength and conditioning coach doesn't have to remind them, but the Huskies previously formed a team that didn't hold up well last fall under pressure or when everyone's endurance was put to the test. 

The Huskies lost six games in the fourth quarter. They got beat by all three Northwest rivals. They even dropped their throwback game against UCLA devoted to the program's 1991 national championship.

Enter McKeefery with a different approach to offseason preparation. Just like his UW predecessor Tim Socha, now at Old Dominion, he's demanding. Different from Socha, who's now dealing with basketball rather than football players for the first time, there's more fun to the new guy than simply the impatient growl of the old one.

Every day, the new weight coach posts a video or photo for the public to see what his Huskies are doing. Lifting, running, pulling, sweating, competing.

McKeefery understands this is a group coming off a lot of negatives. The previous coaching staff was fired. These players were supposed to be good and they weren't. They required new energy and hope.

“I asked every single guy if I had their permission to push them — to coach them hard," he told the Seattle Times. "Coaching hard isn’t yelling and screaming and cussing and getting in their face. Coaching hard is pushing them outside their comfort zone. Because there’s no growth in comfort."

McKeefery is an interesting character. While he looks like he could have been a stubby little offensive guard, the guy actually was an all-conference defensive back on the small-college level at Ottawa University in Kansas. 

He's divided the Huskies into teams, trying to make the drudgery fun, looking for anything that will resonate with this collection of elite athletes.

As a weight coach, McKeefery has worked in some sort of capacity with the pros in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Cincinnati Bengals, NFL Europe's Berlin Thunder and Kansas City Royals.

He's spent time in the SEC with Tennessee, in the MAC at Eastern Michigan, in the American Athletic Conference with South Florida and most recently in the Mountain West for DeBoer at Fresno State. He's got a diverse and lengthy resume.

Everywhere across college football, teams lift and train at a high level during the winter months. It's up to someone such as McKeefery to find a way to get just that little bit of extra out of his guys.

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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