Will Hicks roars a command to the rows of green- and red-uniformed Syracuse football players.

The players flop on their backs. They lift their sculpted legs toward the sky.

‘Legs straight. Toes back,’ he screams through his trademark bushy mustache, before bellowing out a cadence.

‘Two, three, four, five, six …’

Hicks, the head strength and conditioning coach at Syracuse, is a numbers guru. His job requires it. There’s only a limited period of time to transform high school athletes that come to SU from 210-pound weaklings to 270-pound behemoths. But after a decade at Syracuse, he has many successes. Indianapolis Colts all-pro Dwight Freeney still requests his training regimens be handwritten by Hicks.

Another exercise begins: ‘Elbows straight. Hips closed.’

And Hicks starts up the count: ‘Two, fee, fuh, fi …’

Hal Luther, Hicks’ right-hand man for more than a decade, calls it a simple 3-to-1 ratio. That’s all conditioning requires. Run 100 yards in 15 seconds. Earn a 45-second rest. Do it again. Once these athletes can do that, they’ll be in shape for the season. Ready to slap on the orange.

‘Knees high. Elbows in.’

It’s just gibberish now: ‘Ta, eee, foo …’

Those numbers aren’t important anyway. They just distract from the figures that matter. Will any Syracuse athlete be able to hang clean 400 pounds? Can they run the length of the football field in 15 seconds? Can they do it 12 times in a row? 14? 20? While also lifting four times a week?

Hicks and Luther obsess over those numbers during the spring and the forthcoming summer.

But there’s one other number that should matter to the football team’s head strength and conditioning coach.

Three. Or maybe it should be one. Will Hicks is the one member of the coaching staff who’s been a member of Syracuse’s last three coaching staffs. He was hired by Paul Pasqualoni in 2000. He weathered the Greg Robinson era. And now he’s thrilled to be working under Doug Marrone.

But the fact that Hicks, alongside his assistant Luther (who splits time with several sports), is all that’s left from the Pasqualoni staff is a testament to what Hicks and Luther can do. They are the mathematicians of the football team. Scientists in sweat pants and baseball caps.

‘If all you want to do is lift you weights, go join a Gold’s Gym,’ Hicks says. ‘You train an athlete different than you train a weightlifter or a bodybuilder or anything else. You are training to be an athlete. Movement, skill, anything else – a lot of things come into play. It is a science.’

Spring football, which ended Saturday with the spring game, is one of Hicks’ busiest times of the year. The experimenting often begins at 4:15 a.m. Hicks and Luther will set up workouts for a small group of football players at 5 a.m., before the 6 a.m. meetings. These days sometimes extend until 9 p.m., Luther says.

That doesn’t bother anybody. Hicks describes working under Marrone as a rebirth. Pasqualoni hired Hicks and Luther from North Carolina State, Hicks’ alma mater, in 2000. After training under legendary strength coach John Stuckey as a grad assistant at North Carolina State, Hicks soon inherited Stuckey’s position as the football squad’s head strength coach.

But then Pasqualoni came calling. And despite spending 16 years coaching the Wolfpack, and attending almost a dozen bowl games with the team, Hicks felt tempted to move from the state of North Carolina for the first time in his life.

It was something about the likes of Larry Csonka and Jim Brown and other rough-and-tumble Syracuse football legends that drew Hicks up north. He wanted to develop the ‘blue-collar, hard-nosed, smash-mouth’ type of athlete. Once Pasqualoni promised Hicks he could bring his top assistant Luther, Hicks was on board.

Somewhere along the way that ‘blue-collar’ philosophy disappeared for the program, Hicks says. Pasqualoni was fired in 2004. He was replaced by Robinson, a more laid-back coach who brought less of a disciplinarian attitude than past head coaches.

When talking about Robinson’s time as head coach, Hicks’ voice keeps trailing off. (‘We had some tremendous amount of success with Coach P and his staff, and um, not you know. … Coach Robinson came in and, um … and now with Coach Marrone I really believe Syracuse will be back.’)

He uses vacuities like ‘difficult’ and ‘different’ to describe his time under Robinson. He leaves the rest up to everyone else to figure out.

Robinson was fired last year, and Marrone took over. He sat down with Hicks and Luther, and he told them to give a presentation on their ideas for the strength and conditioning program.

‘In my mind coming in here, I knew what I wanted,’ Marrone says. ‘I told coach Hicks, ‘Don’t worry about what I want. You tell me what you can do.”

They pitched ‘blue-collar’ football. The style of play that harkened back to the days of Pasqualoni, and Pasqualoni’s predecessor Dick MacPherson – who Marrone played under while at Syracuse.

Marrone saw eye to eye, and the two coaches were retained.

It’s hard to say how much strength and conditioning factored into the football team’s failure under Robinson, and whether Hicks and Luther were producing the right type of athletes to fit Robinson’s style. But taking a look at Hicks’ past success, it’s hard not to wonder how the team didn’t have more success with its talent.

Tony Fiammetta will likely be the only Syracuse player drafted in this weekend’s NFL draft. He is also the strongest running back in the draft, after benching 30 reps at the NFL combine. Talking to him about Hicks and Luther is like listening to an infomercial on weight training.

‘I came into college weighing 215 pounds and worked to 250 pounds,’ Fiammetta says. ‘As long as I do what Hicks says, I knew I was going to get results.’

Freeney had similar results, entering the NFL draft as college football’s strongest defensive end. Hicks recalls Josh Thomas, a defensive end with the Colts, ‘like a drop of water on a sewing thread.’ Thomas came in at 220 pounds and left 273, and his 40-yard dash time dropped from 5 seconds to 4.67.

The strength and conditioning duo’s next major success appears to be Jared Kimmel. The defensive end came into SU at 220 pounds, now weighs 259, and he should follow in Fiammetta’s steps as the next Orange player who can hang clean 400 pounds, after reaching 385 pounds last fall.

Kimmel has bought into everything the ‘Will Hicks way.’

‘He gets you going,’ Kimmel says. ‘I’m used to him now. It’s funny to listen to him talk and how he yells. But he knows his stuff.’

They care about these athletes. Even when Hicks and Luther’s future was in limbo for two weeks in December when Syracuse had no head coach, the twosome came out to train with the graduating seniors who hoped to get drafted.

‘Our mentality was we’re not fired yet because nobody told us we were,’ Luther says.

That motivation has carried over to this spring. After finishing the pre-practice workout, Luther grabs several green-shirted linemen, corrals them in a circle and hops into the middle. Luther screams out for jumping jacks, and he leaps up and down with them,

his bald head bobbing in the midst of the sea of green.

Luther grew up around Central New York. He loves this place. Hicks says he had talked to other coaches about options for the future, while his role at Syracuse was still up in the air – but neither Luther nor Hicks wants to abandon this program.

‘I wanted to be here to see this thing come back,’ Luther says. ‘Because this is where I based everything I grew up in. I did not want to leave this place knowing I had a part in the demise of it.’

Hicks and Luther have lofty goals for this summer. It’s all about achieving those numbers.

Strength training is not about how much a player can bench, Luther says, it’s how often he can do it. An average football game boils down to 72 plays. An average play lasts for five to eight seconds. The average recovery time is 28 to 35 seconds. The intensity rises in Luther’s voice as he explains his numbers: ‘Can you do that over and over and over again?’

While Luther is handling the linemen today, Hicks starts his own workout with Darnell Pratt and Mikhail Marinovich. Marinovich lies on his back while Hicks leans on his forearm. The coach keeps shouting in Marinovich’s face – only pausing to spit to Marinovich’s right.

Smash-mouth football is coming back to Syracuse. Marrone guarantees it. And Hicks and Luther are elated to be the guys bringing it back.

‘I feel fortunate to be able to stay through three head coaches,’ Hicks says. ‘You’d like to think that your loyalty and body of work and what you’ve done speaks for itself and has something to do with you staying. And sometimes you roll the dice and things just happen to fall your way.’

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Published on April 21, 2009 at 12:00 pm