Off-season training evolves with technology

Paul Franklin
| Special for MyCentralJersey.com

PISCATAWAY — Before Jay Butler ended up at Rutgers as the football team’s strength and conditioning coach, the Bucknell graduate began his career as a graduate assistant in the strength and conditioning department at East Carolina University.

It was 1992. He was 22 years old.

He remembers well the first day he entered the weight room where the female track and field athletes trained.

“I saw her across the crowded weight room,” Butler said recently, relaxing in a chair behind his desk in the Hale Center’s 15,500-square-foot facility.

The girl he saw was the one he would marry. Her name was Jo Ann Thornton, 20, from Delaware. Butler, who grew up in Hillsborough, couldn’t help but notice that she and a teammate weren’t paying attention to a particular practice.

“I was starting to get angry,” he said with a smile. “I even yelled at him the first day.”

They now have four daughters: Kylie, 21; Casey, 20; Sydney, 19; and Katherine, 16. Two of them attend the University of Florida, the other attends Florida State University. The youngest will be a junior in high school. Plus, there’s the cat and the dog.

The State of Florida and Florida? It’s called a house divided.

And in more ways than one.

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Since Butler returned to Rutgers in 2020, reuniting with football coach Greg Schiano, he has lived with his parents in the house where he grew up, while his wife and daughters remain in Florida. The family had moved there when Butler followed Schiano to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers job.

Butler, now RU’s director of sports performance, joined his team in 2001.

“It’s not ideal,” Butler said of being 1,100 miles away from family. “It was a tough decision. Kylie was going to be a senior and we had planned to move back to New Jersey after she graduated (2021). But COVID threw a wrench in everything. Everyone was a senior after that, and the last one is a junior, so no one wants to leave.”

He takes a few weeks off after the season, a few weekends in February when recruiting is over, and spring break. His longest break is three weeks in May. And of course, he FaceTimes.

With training officially starting in late July, it’s his busiest time of year.

On this late afternoon, a few players were testing weight machines, while another was snatching passes by spinning them on a relentless machine.

“If you don’t like football or your teammates, it’s a really tough place to be. There’s no hiding from it,” Butler said. “Trust me.”

During the summer months, it is not uncommon to see players training from morning until late afternoon. In addition to a multitude of various weight machines, there is also a 60-meter FieldTurf track.

“Sports science has evolved a little bit since last time,” Butler said of the technological advances. “Whether it’s from a performance standpoint or recovery standpoint, we’re using metrics to try to mimic training or games. We’re able to measure a lot of different things that you didn’t have before from a performance standpoint.”

“In the old days, there were very few absolute metrics to measure performance or progress. There were speed times, strength numbers, and jump metrics. Today,” he adds, “there are catapult sets that measure speed in miles per hour and how quickly you accelerate, change direction. It’s basically a velocity-based system that measures how fast you move during a typical strength exercise, like bench presses or squats. It’s a speed, intensity, and reps program. You can tell kids to move fast, but now you can actually measure it.”

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“Now you have GPS, force plates, recovery data, and a velocity-based lifting system that allows you to track the speed of the bar in many of your strength exercises. Everything we have allows us to program like never before and track their progress like never before. It adds intensity to everything they do because it gives them immediate feedback.”

“There have been significant changes in what they have at their disposal,” he said of the program. “Nutritionist, recovery (index) training room, salt pools, saunas and sleep chambers. Any chance to get an edge,” he said.

Butler has four assistants, each with expertise in sports science and analytics.

“It doesn’t help them lift weights or run faster. Are they actually improving as athletes? That’s what I’m interested in,” Butler said. “Does it make a difference in a positive way? How are you using your strength? Are you more powerful? Can you accelerate better?”

Butler, whose father Fred was an assistant football coach at Hillsborough (1969-71) before becoming the head coach at Metuchen (1972-75), knows all about conditioning. After playing at Hillsborough, he became a two-time All-American tackle (6-foot-1, 300 pounds) at Bucknell. He was a freshman when Schiano was a senior captain there. He then signed with the Giants as a free agent and played one year in the NFL.

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“My dedication has given me the opportunity to play in the NFL,” he said. “When I started coaching, I had the same mentality that I did, I thought I could do the same thing for these kids. I try to instill the same level of discipline and accountability.”

He took those qualities to East Carolina, then to Dartmouth for five years, and finally to Rutgers.

“Coach Schiano sees the weight room as the incubator of culture. We push them to make sacrifices. What are you willing to do outside of here? Are you willing to go to bed, eat the right foods, hydrate? It’s a huge sacrifice,” Butler said.

For Butler, it’s a job he loves.

Almost as much as being a father of four daughters.

After leaving the NFL, he joined IMG Academy in Bradenton. The family remained in Tampa, about 50 miles north of IMG.

While his wife took a job as an account manager in the medical device industry, Butler became a stay-at-home dad.

“I would drop them off at school and then go play golf,” he says with a laugh. “But I could do the shopping, I could clean, I could cook, I could do everything that needed to be done around the house, the gardening. I would pick them up from school and take the girls wherever I went. Just having four healthy children is a blessing. Of course, the girls cry a lot. But for two and a half years, I loved it.”

He also loved his career, because after all, it gave him his family.