Penn State football hosts annual Lift for Life, showcasing team’s competitiveness
LaVar Arrington II crouched on the practice field in Holuba Hall with his hands on his hips. He’d just stepped off an exercise bike, where he’d put everything he had in reaching the highest speed he could. It’s July 1, over two months away from the football season, but the Penn State sophomore and his teammates are still competing — this time at the annual Lift for Life event.
“What an awesome event for me to be a part for the first time,” Penn State strength and conditioning coach Reid Kagy said afterward. “I know some of these guys have been a part before. We were able to put our little twist on it, and make it competitive. We go out throughout the season, and we have leadership teams, and they’re competing in everything we do, because we’re going to compete in the fall. And sometimes some of that stuff is absent throughout the off season.
“The competition piece of it, there’s not a win and loss. We’re trying to create a win and loss every day.”
Arrington and the rest of the team took part in Wednesday’s Lift for Life, the signature event of the program’s Uplifting Athletes chapter benefitting research for rare diseases. They competed by pushing sleds, tossing medicine balls, and doing various other challenges. And by doing so showed off a key feature of what the program will be under new head coach Matt Campbell — its competitiveness.
Kagy, who came with Campbell from Iowa State, oversaw the competitions Wednesday. And it was another in a line of ways that he has seen the team continue to bond as it retools what Penn State is. Because he and his staff get the most time with the players during the offseason and that has allowed him to help set the culture.
“You have people that were here before at Penn State, the guys that chose to stay,” Kagy said. “We have the guys you brought from Iowa State. We have some of the transfers we brought from other programs, some of the incoming freshmen. There’s a lot of people, and not everybody knew each other right away. Relationships are critical in what we do. It’s critical in team building, it’s critical in the success of the team in the fall, for us to spend that amount of time with them, we needed it.”
Applying a new style
Kagy’s arrival brings an end to a line of strength and conditioning coaches who came from the same professional lineage. Craig Fitzgerald, Bill O’Brien’s S&C coach at Penn State, was a mentee of Dwight Galt, who took over when James Franklin came to State College in 2014. And Chuck Losey, who became Franklin’s S&C coach after Galt retired in 2022, was also a mentee of the long-time strength coach.
Kagy, on the other hand, did not overlap with any of those three on any coaching staffs. That could be a change of pace at Penn State, with the new strength and conditioning coach saying the way he runs the room will inevitably have some differences from what players are used to.
“Everybody is a little bit different,” Kagy said. “You come into a new weight room and a rack is a rack to a certain degree, and we didn’t look at flipping the room. They did a great job building this room, however many years ago. The room’s beautiful, the space is beautiful, the equipment’s great. I think the way we run the room compared to any other staff that may have been before or somebody else. I think that’s one important thing. The room has to fit the way you train, so it wasn’t the things that we didn’t have. I think coming into this room, it was how do we set this room up with what’s here to fit the style that we train in, to fit how we are going to maneuver around the room.”
Everything Kagy and his staff do in Penn State’s expansive weight room and other facilities will be in service off what will help the Nittany Lions improve on the football field in the fall. There will be no lifting heavy weights for the sake of doing it, or anything in that realm. Everything will have a purpose — which means each position is treated differently.
“I want to make sure our guys know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how it’s going to impact them on the football field,” Kagy said. “...The most violent team in the nation is what we would love to be. We’re training towards that every single day. But it’s a little bit different by position, and obviously you have to treat that different because the positions are different. On top of that, we want to keep our guys in the field. They came here to play football, they came here to impact this program and impact this community. We want to keep them on the field.”
Quick hitters
- Kagy said quarterback Rocco Becht, who he worked with at Iowa State, is faster than he previously was and has been a key piece of the team’s leadership this offseason
- Linebacker Tony Rojas has continued his recovery from a torn ACL last season, and has made a big impact behind the scenes, according to Kagy.
- Defensive tackle Armstrong Nnodim remains one of the biggest presences on the team — both physically and vocally. He’s slightly undersized when it comes to height and length for a defensive tackle, but he’s a ball of muscle at 6-foot-2, 310 pounds. And he’s consistently one of the loudest voices in the room — even leading the team in singing “Happy Birthday” to a staffer prior to Wednesday’s event.
Scenes from Lift for Life
