SALT LAKE CITY — Doug Elisaia had forgotten about the rust. He woke his children up around 6 a.m. one morning, eager to show them where their dad was really first introduced to strengthening his body so many decades prior. The family was back on the island of American Samoa, where Elisaia grew up, in the village of Leone, where he played high school football. There weren’t enough helmets for the entire varsity roster back then, so he had a buddy on the other side of the ball who he had to locate when he ran off the field.
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Without a helmet buddy, you couldn’t play.
But the alarm clock went off so the Elisaias could go work out as one. They went to the same local weight room Elisaia grew up frequenting. This was the first time some of his four kids had ever been back to American Samoa. Some had never seen where their dad grew up. What better way to show them the ropes then the makeshift gym he started lifting at as a teenager?
Thing is, though, his kids are all either college graduates, college students or teenagers. And he’d forgotten about the rust on the weights.
“Everyone was wearing some nice white workout clothes,” said Elisaia, unable to hold back the laughs from his seat behind his desk inside the Eccles Football Center. “There’s no AC. It’s hot inside. By the second or third set, there was rust and dirt everywhere, their clothes were all ragged.”
Elisaia’s chuckles had simmered a bit.
“I told them, ‘This is where I started,’” he said.
“It was cool to see how he got brought up,” said son, Samu, a junior linebacker at Utah. “It helped mold him into how he is now. It was cool for me and family to see that.”
Over 5,000 miles away, across the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, Elisaia has spent the last 14 years shaping the present and future of Utah football. Quite literally, too. He is the program’s director of football sports performance. In the college football realm, he’s known as the strength and conditioning coach. While Kyle Whittingham’s program routinely draws praise for being one of the top developmental football teams in the country, it clearly goes beyond the X’s and O’s. For so many student-athletes, their path to the field starts with Elisaia and his five full-time staffers pushing them behind the scenes.
“In this program, we’ve hung our hat on two and three-star guys and we’ve got to develop those guys,” Elisaia said. “We very rarely get the four-, five-star guys. You’ve got to develop your guys to compete with those schools that are stacked with five-star guys and it starts in here. It starts upstairs with Kyle and his commitment to being blue-collar and it just trickles down here.
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“That’s why I’ve been here so long. His philosophy fits what I believe in. I’ve had chances to leave, but I stayed. How he sees the program and our culture just fits how I grew up.”
In this day and age of the college football strength coach being a hulked out screaming sideline stereotype, Elisaia is basically the exact opposite.
“Like a crazy psycho? Nah,” said junior wide receiver Samson Nacua. “I think that’s what makes him the best in the Pac-12, even the best in the nation.
“He definitely knows we need to be the toughest team in the Pac-12. He’s also not there to be our friend, but he’s not there to be a complete asshole. He wants us to be the best we can be and wants us to have fun, because if you’re having fun, you’re probably winning and that’s a good time. Maybe it’s the Polynesian in him. But I think he’s more chill than most lifting coaches.”
“He’s not one of them, no,” added senior safety Terrell Burgess. “He’s not that one.”
He blends in with the Utah coaching staff sideline seamlessly, which is precisely the way he wants it. He doesn’t want the ESPN special feature done on him. Elisaia wants his players to get better, faster, stronger and more prepared for their respective positions as quickly as possible.
“It’s like raising kids, man,” he said. “Kids see through that stuff. In our program, there’s no fluff. There’s no bright lights. It’s all hard work. I think the kids eventually see through that stuff and if you need to be that guy to get your kids ready, sometimes you’re not doing your job. At some point, when you’re a parent, and you’re yelling at your kids all the time … at some point, it goes in one ear and out the other.”
His fit with Whittingham and the program traces back to his days swapping helmets on the field in Pago Pago, to being a defensive tackle at NAIA school Iowa Wesleyan, where he was an Academic All-American. His alma mater didn’t have a strength coach. It was an assistant football coach who had to double down on his duties.
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“I didn’t have a whole lot of money, I couldn’t do a lot. So as kids left, I stayed back and hung out in the weight room. (During) Christmas break, you hung out in the weight room. Spring break, you hung out in the weight room,” he said. “That was our thing to do. It was free. We’d eat, sleep and go work out and do it all over again the next day.”
Life in the gym took him to McPherson College in Kansas where he started life as a strength and conditioning coach. He then hopped to Wayne State and later Kentucky where he worked with the Wildcats’ football and baseball teams. The fortuitous phone call came in 2004 and it came from former Utah assistant coach, Gary Andersen, now Utah State’s head coach.
Andersen asked for Elisaia. Elisaia told Andersen he had the wrong office extension. Former Utah head coach Ron McBride, then Kentucky’s linebackers coach, was elsewhere in the Kentucky complex. Andersen was calling on behalf of Whittingham, who was taking over as Utah’s head coach. The Kentucky graduate assistants were staring at Elisaia as Andersen explained to him that Whittingham was going to call him later that night for a job interview.
“I told the guys it was a wrong number,” Elisaia said.
Four years later, he discovered the genesis of the phone call. When Utah faced Weber State in September 2008, McBride was the head coach of the Wildcats. Elisaia, Whittingham and McBride talked at midfield inside Rice-Eccles Stadium during warmups.
“I want you to know that this is the guy that called me and told me I needed to hire you,” Whittingham told Elisaia.
(Chris Gardner / Getty Images)The world of sports science is evolving at a rapid rate. It used to be counting yardage during two-a-days with pen and paper and gauging wear and tear on bodies by yards accumulated in practice. Now?
“Everything we do is scientific,” Elisaia said. “A lot of people don’t know. It’s not just pushing weights and counting sets and reps anymore. It’s about tracking guys with GPS units on the field, knowing their player loads, how that transfers over, where their bodies are based on that data and to know how much we can push them in here based on that data and (during) certain times of the year.
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“You push a guy to be as strong as he has to be to play his position and not necessarily have to squat 700 pounds. We’re not trying to build powerlifters here; we’re trying to enhance their ability to play their sport at a higher level.”
Every player demands different areas of focus. Linemen have to be powerful enough to exert energy and strength in the trenches. Wide receivers and cornerbacks, conversely, don’t need the same amount of muscular work. Much of their focus in the weight room is velocity-based training, where their positions demand more fine-tuning of speed.
“We use push technology, where we track the velocity of the bar and counts reps and shows the amount of power and force into the bar,” Elisaia explained. “Then we start challenging them that way. Let’s not worry about the weight, but let’s develop power. We track that on a system. There’s a live feed out there and guys see it live. It’s going up on the board in real-time and guys are competing in the fastest times.”
How is the job different today than, say, nearly a decade ago, when Utah entered the Pac-12 Conference in 2011?
“It’s in a different realm, (and) it’s just different from when I grew up, too,” Elisaia said. “The field is definitely progressing. In this field, if you’re not learning the science part of it, you’re going to fall behind pretty quick. Honestly, the easiest part for us is getting guys bigger, faster, stronger. The hardest part is getting guys to buy in.”
“In this day and age where we don’t control their playing time, we’ve got to hang our hat on something where they’ve got to believe in us to push them. Bottom line is you’ve got to care.”
Players see Elisaia’s own buy-in.
“He’s a workhorse,” Burgess said. “He’s a hard-working man. Definitely, everything he wants to get out of you, he’ll get out of you in whatever way possible. But I love him.”
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“He treats me just like everyone else,” Samu Elisaia said. “You’ve got to work.”
Doug Elisaia is intense when he needs to be. He doesn’t raise his voice to go along with some character he’s conjured up for himself. When his voice does exceed its normal range, “it means something and that they better jump and get to work.” That defines the DNA of the Utah program. Work and only work will keep them atop the Pac-12.
“Kyle talked to team the other day about grass isn’t always greener on the other side,” Elisaia said in an interview last month. “I tell kids the grass is only greener when you water it.”
More work.
(Photo of Doug Elisaia: Courtesy of Utah athletics)
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