Tennessee native Stephen Lockett brings new perspective and a detailed resume to New England College’s new strength and conditioning program as the head strength and conditioning coach and coordinator.
“New England College reached out for an interview. Never heard of it, but the more I looked into it, the more I was really excited about it, because it was a smaller school.”
Lockett didn’t always see himself in this role. In fact, it was sports injuries that led him to his current role. After graduating high school Lockett pursed his undergraduate degree at King University where he played collegiate basketball. After suffering some sports injuries, he made the difficult decision to discontinue his collegiate career. This is when he found exercise science at King University. He began competing in weightlifting and coaching strength and conditioning programs, and then pursued his masters in sports science at East Tennessee State University where he was able to study at one of the best sports science programs. Throughout his undergraduate and graduate programs Lockett was able to coach a variety of sports, including swim, women’s volleyball, and men and women’s soccer. Between his undergraduate and graduate degrees Lockett interned at the University of Tennessee for a summer working as a strength coach for their football team.
“So, kind of for me, it was a way to stay in sports, even though I, you know, had to quit my collegiate career. So, I found Olympic weightlifting, and I knew I wanted to teach that to athletes if I was going to be a strength coach.”
And that’s exactly what he plans to do here.
In his first year of his first director position, Lockett has the NEC sports teams learning the Olympic lifts and how to move properly. Looking long-term Lockett would like to run a sports-science program.
“We want to eventually have a very systematic testing protocol, so every team has their own spec test. Spec test is basically a performance test where we look at, we call them KPIs. They’re key performance indicators, and they’re metrics specific to the sport that the athlete is playing. And we want to test those metrics regularly to see if the strength and conditioning program is helping them make progress.”
Lockett also has hopes of one day collaborating with academics at NEC and bringing in more high-tech equipment. “We’re looking to collaborate possibly build a laboratory, possibly do research with our athletes, possibly have a bunch if testing here,” he said.
“We are really trying to make this as data-driven program as possible so that every time we run a program every time, we enlist a new exercise it’s scientifically backed and data driven.”
