Joey Bergles is the Director of Strength & Conditioning at JJ Pearce High School in Richardson, Texas. In addition to his coaching responsibilities at the high school, he oversees the S&C programs at the two junior highs that feed into JJ Pearce High School and works with third through sixth graders at elementary schools within the district. Prior to his current position, he worked in the collegiate setting, with stops ranging from the NAIA to Division 1 levels. Joey can be found on social media at @joeybergles (Twitter/Instagram/TikTok). He holds the following certifications and/or has attended the following courses: FRCms, FRA, Kinstretch, FR Lower Limb (Non-Therapist), Metabolic Analytics, Poliquin Internship Hours, DNS A, Art of Coaching Apprenticeship, CSCS.
Nate Huffstutter: You’ve presented on how critical it is to design activities that have a high level of engagement when working with athletes who are in their early teens—what’s your process for choosing or developing those exercises that promote genuine engagement and how do you determine what is and isn’t working?
Joey Bergles: First, I need to have an idea of how many kids I’m working with, what ages they are, have I worked with them before—those kinds of questions. One of the biggest keys with high school and junior high school kids is how everything is structured, even just in terms of sightlines. When you’re trying to do different activities in a big open space and there are no dividers, that’s where attention gets lost.
That’s one of the biggest issues I’ve seen, and sometimes I have to decide if we’re going to use dividers or go into a hallway, because there may be five or six coaching points I want to make and there will be distracted people in the back with wandering eyes. On the other hand, in a smaller, confined area, all they can do is focus on me.
I’m very lucky with the facility that I have—we have a weight room and then an indoor training area next to our weight room, and our weight room has dividers that let us section it off into quarters. That was one of the keys that helped me in my junior high program this past summer—okay, we’re going to go 20, 25, maybe 30 minutes between the weight room and the four sections and the turf room, and then I’m going to structure my entire workout around that constraint. There may be other stuff I want to do, but if I can’t figure out how to do it within that specific setting, then I’m not going to do it or I’m going to figure something else out.
I’ll be honest, that was probably THE biggest thing, regardless of the X’s and O’s, because if you have smaller groups, then you have to rotate, and it takes more time to rotate. Realistically, in an hour session, we would have four stations—you’re talking about 12-13 minutes with each group. So, when you only have 12-13 minutes, you don’t have a lot of time to do a lot of stuff. And, if we’re doing stuff for seven or eight weeks, that’s where, when we’re doing progressions, you really see things flow together. So, it’s probably not going to be perfect on week 1, but by week 5 or 6, we’ll be working these progressions, and we’ll keep getting better.