Basketball Weight Room Bulks Up to Twice its Size
Thursday, September 17, 2015 | Men's Basketball, Chris Harry
GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- Remember that Florida front line of Patric Young, Will Yeguete and Casey Prather? Pretty good tandem, right? One of the reasons they were so good was because they trained really hard in the basketball weight room.
Truth be told, though, their training sessions, while obviously productive by the looks of their builds, were not as efficient as their strength and conditioning coordinator would have liked.
Space (specifically, the lack thereof) would not allow it.
“Will and Pat were on a body [composition] program, but I might have had Casey in there with them on a different program,” Preston Greene explained. “The goal is always to go, go, go when we're in there, but sometimes one of them might have had to wait for a rack or pair of dumb bells or maybe a pulley. That can derail a guy's energy system. It was frustrating sometimes.”
Florida fans can only hope a projected 2015-16 frontcourt of, say, Dorian Finney-Smith, John Egbunu and Devin Robinson will have a year like the one Young, Yeguete, Prather and his friends enjoyed in a seasons ago. One thing's for for certain.
They'll never be log-jammed in the UF weight room.
The $1 million expansion to the basketball training center is complete and now in full use for the two hoops teams, plus the men's and women's tennis and golf programs.
The weight room now spans 3,056 square feet -- as opposed 1,525 -- and has doubled its dumb bell racks, added more machines and equipment, plus a nutrition and fuel station, and additional office space.
“It's much bigger and much better,” said Finney-Smith, the senior and All-Southeastern Conference forward said. "We got room in here to do our thing."
[Click here to visit a gallery of the new basketball weight room]
In April, construction workers began the process of blowing out a pair of walls and building an addition on the back end of the facility to house laundry and storage. While the project was on-going, the entire weight room inventory -- and all six teams -- relocated to the stadium's south end zone weight complex, where a makeshift area was set up for the better part of four months.
The inconvenience was a small price to pay for the eventual reward.
Now there's enough elbow (and bench-press) room for athletes from two sports -- and their varied programs -- to work out in there, if need be.
As for Greene, he now has his own office and no longer shares one with women's coordinator Tyler Stuart and intern Sean Ferguson. Gone also are the days of making protein shakes in an adjoining closest, thanks to the nutrition station.
“I'm really, really happy with how it all turned out,” Greene said. “And I know our athletes are, too.”
