First and foremost, I am not the voice of professional baseball strength and conditioning. I do not think of myself as above anyone else. This article is nothing more than my thoughts based on my own personal experience. If you have a conversation about this with any other strength and conditioning coach in professional baseball, he/she may tell you something completely different. With that being said, I’d like to share my thoughts on what the role of a strength and conditioning coach in professional baseball really is, with a special focus on the Minor Leagues (as most of these points will be completely different in the Major Leagues).

If you have never worked in the professional baseball setting (especially in the Minor Leagues), we need to paint the picture of everything that is involved in the daily life of the in-season strength and conditioning coach.

1. Strength and conditioning duties: This includes everything you’d expect for a strength and conditioning coach in just about any setting – running dynamic warm-ups, running players through conditioning sessions, strength training sessions in the weightroom, programming modifications based on any number of factors (athlete readiness, equipment availability, etc.). Additionally, a strength and conditioning coach in the Minor Leagues also has to coordinate the usage of visiting city gyms (which means either using a local facility in the city or using the home team’s facility if available).
2. Nutrition: This responsibility will tend to vary from organization to organization, but a general rule of thumb is that you can expect the strength and conditioning coach at the affiliate to take care of the food for the players. This means setting up meals (both pre-game and post-game) on the road and potentially at home, maintaining budget records, working with clubhouse managers on available snacks in the clubhouse, making smoothies/shakes for players, and any other number of nutrition-related tasks. Some teams have designated nutritionists at affiliates to handle these tasks, but again, this depends on your organization.
3. Mental Skills: Although this is not our area of expertise and organizations have designated mental skills coaches, most are not actually assigned to affiliates for day-to-day work and instead only visit once or twice per month. Again this varies from organization to organization, and some organizations do indeed have mental skills coaches that are with the affiliate team daily, but for the most part players are keen to opening up to the strength and conditioning coach more so than any other coach on the staff. Therefore, mental skills responsibilities do tend to fall in the lap of the strength and conditioning coach in at least some capacity.
4. Sport Science Initiatives: Depending on how much your organization values “sport science”, the strength and conditioning coach at the affiliate may be tasked with monitoring these initiatives as well. My conversations with other coaches in the Minor Leagues have ranged from using GymAware for Velocity-Based Training to force plates for monthly testing to Catapult for GPS monitoring and workload management. Some organizations will have someone designated to the affiliate for this monitoring, but for the most part this will again fall on the strength and conditioning coach.
5. Monitoring and Reports: Again, this will vary within organizations, but for the most part you can expect to do daily, weekly, and monthly reporting. Daily reporting can include training volume logs, nutrition logs, and monitoring (RPE, grip strength, etc.). Weekly reporting may be overall weekly training volume, and monthly reports can include compliance reports and body composition measurements.

Having conversations with other strength and conditioning coaches in the Minor Leagues has led me to believe that this list will be fairly consistent with most coaches. In other words, the strength and conditioning coach at a Minor League affiliate has much more on his/her plate than just the X’s and O’s of strength and conditioning. Most of the time the schedule, travel, weather, or coaching staff will also throw a wrench into your ideal plan. Therefore, when working with players to help try to keep them healthy and available to play, I really believe the role of the strength and conditioning coach in Minor League Baseball boils down to two categories: short-term performance and long-term education.

There is a major distinction that needs to be made here. Although we would like them to be the same, the reality is that helping a player to achieve short-term performance DOES NOT ALWAYS equal the same as long-term education. If a player comes to you and tells you that he was out late the night before, ate junk food, didn’t go to bed until 3:00 am, and has yet to eat today and it’s already 3:00 pm, what do you do? The player is going to need to play that night, and he is definitely expected to perform at his highest level. You clearly know that he is not in an “ideal” state to perform, but you need to do something to get him ready to play. You can’t go back in time and change his choices, so taking the time to lecture him pre-game may fall on deaf ears (“Yeah yeah I get it but I can’t change what I did – help me get ready to play!”). Therefore, your short-term approach is getting him prepared for the game. When the game is done you can have a conversation with him about better choices and provide him with education to make better choices in the long-term. All of the above categories (strength and conditioning, nutrition, mental skills, sport science, and monitoring) can essentially be broken down into either short-term performance interventions or long-term education strategies. The role of the strength and conditioning coach at the Minor League affiliate is to distinguish between the two to help the player achieve success and availability to play in both the short-term and the long-term.