How Joe Connolly is remotely training ASU’s players

Joe Connolly isn’t certain about much these days.

But he’s very confident that when all gets back to normal, he’ll be able to get the team back into shape in a relatively short period of time.

“It’s like, you know (how) a really good mechanic can tell what’s wrong with the car before he opens the hood,” Connolly joked. “I’ll be able to tell before the warm-up is over. I’m not even joking … The second (they start), you can just tell by body language, breath rate, sweat rate, all those things.”

Only problem is: he doesn’t know when that date will be. No one does.

Until then, Connolly, ASU’s Head Coach of Sports Performance and his staff have put contingency plans in place on how they will remotely train their players for the next month or all throughout the summer, should the COVID-19 pandemic cause that to be the case.

Connolly simply extended the voluntary strength and conditioning regimen from spring break into last week. Then on Monday, he provided another voluntary month-long program through the app, ‘Group Me,’ that places a large focus on relative strength. Or, in other words, workouts like push-ups, pull-ups, and lunges.

It’s a program far different from the typical offseason plan he assigns the Sun Devils, in part, because of one main factor: Right now, it's voluntary and he has to design workouts not knowing if they have has access to a gym or not.

They have their body weight. Some other heavy supplies around their house. And some creativity. For the time being, that’ll work.

“I posted a few videos of a couple of our offensive linemen using like a giant water jug … and they were using that as sort of like a dumbbell,” Connolly said. “One guy I saw was using a duffel bag full of books. I saw a couple of people using a couple of different pieces of furniture. Putting a backpack on with some sort of weight in it as a squat.

“Think about it, you go back 60 years to the military and what were they doing? They were doing pushups. They were doing crunches. They were doing bear crawls. They were doing chin-ups. We’ll be fine.”

Connolly kept repeating the line “uncharted territory.” The whole world is feeling the effects of those two words. On a far more scaled-down level, ASU is learning how to maneuver and operate through the “uncharted territory” this pandemic has dealt.

“It’s just like a football game,” Connolly said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen next. You just have to be able to manage your emotions and go, ‘OK, I’m good. Let’s move forward. This is the new plan.’”

Connolly and his staff thought about creating an app to create a centralized space where the athletes can find their workouts. They’ve talked about utilizing videos -- like the ones the Sun Devils send thier signed recruits -- to help smooth the process and make the at-home work more engaging.

Connolly has been in constant communication with deputy athletics director Jean Boyd and ASU Chief of Staff, Nate Wainwright, to grasp a better understanding, while everything is incredibly fluid, of rules, regulations and possible plans of action from ASU, the Pac-12 and the NCAA.

For example, before ASU shut its facility doors to student-athletes and most of them went home, Connolly, Boyd and Wainwright met for “probably six hours on three different occasions” to go over myriad arrangements and procedures for feeding the Sun Devil athletes.

“We have a plan if we’re able to get guys back in the weight room in two weeks,” Connolly said. “We have a plan if we're going to be able to get guys back in the weight room in a month, we have a plan if we get back in the weight room in May, or in June.

“We just have to use our eyes and use our head and understand where our guys are at so we can either deviate or stick to the plan, depending on what we’ve got moving forward.”

Connolly knows the situation isn’t ideal for his strength and conditioning program. These months are key in the development of a newcomer, the integral time where Connolly’s expertise and training methods manifest themselves in a significant manner.

Are those same results going to show if all he can do is check in on them from hundreds of miles away? Your guess is as good as Connolly's. After all, this is (there's that word again) uncharted territory.

In the grand scheme of things, he knows that’s minutia. Ultimately, this isn’t just an ASU dilemma. This is a problem that affects every college football program in the country.

On Wednesday night, Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly went on ESPN and said he hopes strength and conditioning resume by July to ensure a month of weights before fall practice begins.

For now, the college football season doesn’t feel in jeopardy. But summer strength and conditioning programs, a time where some schools claim to gain a real advantage, has a cloudy at best timeline.

In a perfect world, Connolly would love to see training sessions resume in May so he can conduct a traditional full summer program for the Sun Devils. Yet, with each day that goes by, that notion seems less and less likely.

“We're going to have to be ready,” Connolly said. “Our opponents are not going to care that this happened.”