Sports > May 1, 2008

By Connor Swarbrick | Asst. sports editor

He is not just a strength and conditioning coach and the athletes he works with don’t spend hours slaving in the weight room. No, Ethan Reeve has a different training philosophy.

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Head Strength and Conditioning Coach Ethan Reeve traveled to China with his son and worked with Olympic rowers. This is his eighth year at Wake (Connor Swarbrick/Old Gold & Black)

Reeve is the head strength and conditioning coach, and he is an important component of the astounding success Wake Forest athletics is experiencing.

Weight training and conditioning is something Reeve has always been interested in. He ran six miles a day in the sixth grade and for years did 500 push-ups a day.

“I just love training and working out,” Reeve said. “I saw the value of it, how it helped me in sport and life.”

Coach Reeve and his staff have a philosophy of making the athletes more athletic. While that may sound confusing, it has been incredibly successful.

“We have a unique thing. We work as a team and we get the general stuff done, but we don’t kill them during those workouts so they’ll have time and energy to hopefully do some of those things on their own that they specifically need to do,” Reeve said.

“I was mainly a wrestler and I trained this way with my wrestlers and it worked well with them and since it has worked with every sport.”

However, this philosophy has not always been widely accepted; he had to prove it worked.

When he was working at a prep school in Chattanooga, Tenn., he got a phone call from Hartmut Buschbacher, the U.S. National Team Rowing Coach.

Reeve began to implement his strength and conditioning philosophy after the U.S. won only one bronze medal at the 1993 World Championships.

He began having the rowers play basketball, run bleachers and do tumbling and all sorts of athletic things. In the weight room he focused on exercises such as clean and one-legged squats. In 1994 the team won only one silver medal.

However, in 1995 Reeve saw his program pay off. In the 1995 World Championships they won four gold medals and a silver out of six possible medals.

“It takes time to develop to get that system and the philosophy going,” Reeve said.

“You can’t guarantee wins, everyday you try to make the kids better. You take what you’ve been given and try to inspire them and hopefully what you do improves them.”

Shortly thereafter, Reeve joined Head Football Coach Jim Grobe at Ohio University as the head strength and conditioning coach where they worked together for six seasons.

When Grobe was hired at Wake Forest in 2000 the head strength and conditioning position opened up and Reeve was hired.

This will be their 14th season together.

Earlier this year Reeve’s phone rang and it was the Buschbacher again with another opportunity.

Buschbacher was asked to be the Chinese national rowing coach for the 2012 Olympics in Beijing. Buschbacher once again wanted Reeve to implement his strength and conditioning program.

Reeve agreed to go to China under one condition: that he could bring his 14-year-old son Keaton.

Father and son made the long trek to China.

Their first stay was in a rural area where the rowing team was training.

They stayed in a hotel without a toilet and the weight room was merely a cement slab with a tent over it. But Reeve and his son had a blast.

The two then traveled to Jenin, the training hub for Chinese athletes, where Reeve spoke about his philosophy.

Eating unique Chinese food everyday wasn’t the only thing that took some getting used to.

Reeve, who is 53, has never taken a drink in his life, but at each meal in China he had to sit as the guest of honor and everyone toasted him three times.

They caught on when he put it up to his mouth without drinking.

The two had such a great time that Keaton wants to go back already, which may happen if Buschbacher accepts the position. While Reeve spent most of the time teaching his philosophies, he learned something too.

“Over there nobody gets upset; we were there for all those days and I never saw one person get upset,” Reeve said.

“Those are the nicest, most beautiful people you’ll ever meet.”

Now that he is back at work the weight room is undergoing a major renovation.

They are selling much of the old equipment and having new racks custom built.

A pull-up bar has been installed that runs the length of the weight room.

There will be brand new bumper weights that have Wake Forest on them and the floor will be replaced with a Sport Impact floor. All these changes, which are slated to be finished in June, are for one purpose, setting up an environment that is conducive to Reeve’s style of teaching.

“It will be a Mecca for this type of strength training and great for recruiting,” Reeve said.

Reeve has been fundamental in the success of Wake Forest sports, but he is not in it for the glory.

“I like to be behind the scenes, it makes me feel good,” Reeve said. “What we are trying to do is affect a kid’s life, still deep down I’m a teacher; I’m an educator. The difference is I use weight training.”

Wake Forest teams have consistently been at the top of the national rankings and several athletes have gone on to star professionally and that success is due to the attitude that resonates throughout the athletic department.

“No one kid is better than another kid in this room and not one sport is more important than another,” Reeve said.

“We are here just for kids and hopefully we are here to educate and make them better citizens, better husbands, wives and parents. We want them to be better when they leave here.”

Like the NCAA commercial suggests, this program produces men and women who will be successful no matter what they go pro in.