Connolly’s career of touching lives translating to fatherhood

Arizona State strength coach Joe Connolly has been a father figure for hundreds, perhaps thousands of young men in his 14 years as a college football strength and conditioning coach.

Connolly has coached and mentored copious amounts of players, which has prepared him now for the most important mentoring he will have to do in his life, his newfound fatherhood.

“My whole career, I’ve had 115 or so sons (each season),” Connolly said. “And I always try to treat it that way and treat them with respect and hold them accountable and treat them just like they were a child of mine. And I care about them that much.”

For years, however, Connolly’s only kids were his non-biological ones. But after over a decade of marriage, he and his wife, Shalona, recently welcomed their first child, a girl named Cali. And it was a blessing.

“There’s a personal component to that, that I’d probably rather not talk about,” Connolly stated. “My wife and I have been together, been married for almost 11 years. And we’ve been together almost 16 years. And I’m 40-years-old so; it took a while to kind of get things going, if you know what I mean.”

Fatherhood comes with its challenges, but Connolly is hardly complaining and is adapting to each of the tasks with a bit of aid from a certain helpful website.

“I’m learning a lot of new stuff,” Connolly admitted. “We had our first doctor’s appointment with a pediatrician the other day, and it was the first time we had to put Cali in the car seat. And I’m learning how to do that. Thank god for YouTube, I’ll tell you that. There’s a lot of intricacies to car seats and swaddling and all these different things that are going on that I’ve never had experienced before. So I’m learning as I go, and Shalona and I are both … doing the best we can every day. But we’re definitely super excited about it.”

Connolly’s players, who are effusive about the effect their strength coach has had on their lives and careers, recognized how much of a blessing it is to see him now become a father.

D.J. Davidson, one of ASU’s stalwarts on the defensive line, discussed what it means for Connolly to become a parent and the impact he expects Connolly to have in his new phase in life.

“It’s amazing because I’m married myself, and just to see other relationships bring another life into this world is very inspiring to myself, and he preaches all the time that he just loves us as if we were his kids,” Davidson explained. “I’m pretty sure he loves his kid just the same as he loves us, and even more so, you just love that for him.”

Once a strength coach, always a strength coach, which has Connolly already considering when he can bring his daughter into the ASU training facility to get her accustomed to hearing the sounds of a weight room.

“I can’t wait to get her in the weight room and let her hear the metal banging around, and the barbells getting thrown and get her used to that sound,” Connolly remarked.

Connolly does not have a timetable on when he will start Cali in the weight room, but he did say he will have a way of raising her unique to someone in his profession.

“My wife was making fun of me the other day,” Connolly explained jokingly. “I said we got to put some protein powder in that bottle … to get her pumped up a little bit. I’m just kidding. But as soon as she’s ready to start moving around, we’re going to start moving her around.

"I really like the developmental piece of just humans in general. The crawling, the walking, and the walking to running. And all the different natural things that happen as we age. And it’s funny, I watch Cali move, and I’ve watched a lot of babies move, and babies oftentimes move great. They can drop into a deep squat easily, and they can do all these things that as we age as adults, we forget how to do, and we get tight, and then we get injured. My goal for Cali is for her not to forget how to move the way she’s moving now and the way she’ll move as a toddler.”

Connolly’s impact yields dividends for the ASU program

While Connolly may have some learning to do regarding fatherhood, a skill he has mastered is naturally his job physically developing the football program. Players on both sides of the ball laud their strength coach for how he has helped them.

Defensive end Michael Matus commented that working with Connolly has helped him build up his body weight from an undersized 230 pounds to 260 pounds, a formidbale weight for a Pac-12 defensive end.

“You’ve got to eat, and if you’re sick of eating, you’ve still got to eat,” Matus stated. “But especially in (fall) camp, right? Because guys lose a lot of weight. Coach Joe’s definitely on us about it. On us, all the time getting us bigger and stronger and faster and being able to last four quarters and 12 games.”

On the offensive side of the ball, tight end Curtis Hodges credits Connolly with helping him transition to the physical frame required for a tight end. When Hodges first arrived at ASU, he was a slender wide receiver. With Connolly's guidance, he now weighs 245 pounds.

As to what Connolly has seen from his guys in the offseason training program, he has noticed the ASU players buying into the philosophies of the program more than ever.

“There’s a ton of guys (that have stood out in the offseason),” Connolly stated. “And this would be a four-hour interview if I went through each and every guy, but I think the most important thing is that now in year four for us (the coaching staff), the culture has really solidified itself in that our guys … love and respect the work that they put in and they understand the importance of it.”

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