Titans director of sports performance details versatile approach
The Tennessee Titans have a new director of sports performance for the first time in five seasons. Zac Woodfin will replace Frank Piraino as a part of Brian Callahan’s inaugural Titans staff.
Woodfin comes to the Titans with 18 years of experience in the strength and conditioning field. The coach spent the previous two seasons as the Director of Player Performance and Wellness for the United States Football League and United Football League.
Before that, Woodfin spent time with the Missouri Tigers, Kansas Jayhawks, Southern Miss, UAB, and the Green Bay Packers.
The new coach recently detailed the unique approach he will bring to training. Woodfin described his style as “blue-collar” and “cutting edge.”
“The simplest way to describe our style is blue-collar, and it’s cutting edge,” Woodfin said, per Jim Wyatt. “It’s the perfect balance between those two.
“Blue-collar in the nature of, this is a very physical, violent game, and you have to train hard. There is no way you can train soft and play hard. So, the training has to be hard training at times.
“The cutting-edge part is the assessment, using the technologies that we have, that we brought in with our sports science department, to assess our guys, to know: ‘Are there asymmetries to understand what the things are they really need in order to improve their performance?’ Because everybody is different, and having a very individual training plan for each one of our guys based on the position they play, based on the needs that they gave.”
This will certainly sound nice to Titans fans, who grew tired of seeing Titans’ players consistently appear on the injury report. Under Callahan, the Titans have expanded the sports performance department.
In addition to hiring Woodfin, the Titans also added Mark Lovat, Grant Thorne, and John Shaw. Lovat and Thorne were hired as assistant strength and conditioning coaches while Shaw was hired as a speed training coach. That group of coaches joins holdovers Brian Bell (Assistant Director of Sports Performance) and Haley Roberts (Sports Performance Assistant).
