When Husky sophomore Katie Follett took home the Dawgs first Pac-10 Championship in the women’s 1500-meter run this past weekend, it was obvious to many that in her two years of competing at the collegiate level, she has become one of the nation’s best runners.

Follett said the time she’s spent in the weight room strength training and working on her flexibility have played just as big a role in her success as the amount of miles she logs each week.

Every Husky athlete, including Follett, has world-class coaches who specialize in coaching athletes in his or her individual sport. UW athletes also have a Sports Performance Center that takes just as much pride in the success of Husky athletes as the coaches and athletes do in their sport. The center focuses on weight and strength training and conditioning.

Coach Trent Greener, who heads the center, played football at the University of Wyoming in the late 1980s before moving onto coaching, and eventually focusing on the conditioning and strengthening aspect of athletics. Three years ago, Greener came to the UW and took over the center, after spending several years at Oregon State with Dennis Erickson, his coach at Wyoming.

“My job specifically is to see the day-to-day operations and to manage our department and to make sure the training is running [as it should],” Greener said.

The center’s main focus is to ensure that Husky athletes are kept healthy and are being given the best opportunities to succeed at their sports.

“Number one, we are interested in performance improvement,” Greener said.“That’s the bottom line. In order for that to happen, we look to our training regimens to keep them healthy. In any sport, they have non-traditional seasons. If our programs allow them to perform at a high level, injury prevention is something that we hang our hat on.”

Follett can attest to lifting and strengthening in the off-season, which keeps her healthy and able to perform at a top level.

“During the summer we have a little bit more opportunity to do intensive training,” she said. “It’s a really good opportunity to get in the weight room without risking injury.”

Follett said she lifted weights in high school, but didn’t really have a plan when she walked into the weight room.

“I didn’t really know what I was doing in high school,” she said. “I’ve just learned a lot more about weight lifting [since coming to the UW].“I go into the weight room knowing what I want out of my time in there.”

For a runner like Follett, Greener prefers to look at weight and strength training as an injury prevention mechanism, rather than helping them acquire rippling biceps and chiseled legs.

“There’s repetitive injury and lower body trauma [in running],” he said. “A lot of the training we do is prehabilitative. We can eliminate a lot of overuse injuries [in runners].”

As a runner, Follett tends to spend most of her time in the weight room focusing on core strength and her flexibility.

“We do, on average, about two days a week in the weight room,” she said. “For distance running it’s a lot of flexibility and core strength. We do plyometrics and focus on more sets with low weight as opposed to lower sets with higher weight.”

Greener says that 15 or 20 years ago, cross country runners and track stars were a rare sight in the weight room.

“I’ve been in this for 18 years,” he said. “It’s not just a bunch of football guys anymore. That’s where it started. Football drove the machine. We have gotten away from lifting and started focusing more on running, agility, flexibility and dynamic training. The biggest change is holistic approach to strength and conditioning.”

Although many fans and outsiders to the athletic department may put a great deal of emphasis into how much an athlete can bench press or squat, Greener said those things aren’t as important as making sure that the athlete he is working with is doing the right kinds of exercises to maximize on-field ability.

“Who cares [how much] the soccer athlete is going to squat?” he said.

Though Greener and his staff work with all of the UW athletes performing a wide variety of exercises and programs for each sport, the overall goal remains the same.

“We’re just trying to give athletes the best opportunity to go out and be successful and minimize injury risk,” he said.