Tag: Zac Woodfin

Titans director of sports performance details versatile approach

Titans director of sports performance, Zac Woodfin, recently discussed the approach he’s bringing to Tennessee.

The Tennessee Titans have a new director of sports performance for the first time in five seasons. Zac Woodfin will replace Frank Piraino as a part of Brian Callahan’s inaugural Titans staff.

Woodfin comes to the Titans with 18 years of experience in the strength and conditioning field. The coach spent the previous two seasons as the Director of Player Performance and Wellness for the United States Football League and United Football League.

Before that, Woodfin spent time with the Missouri Tigers, Kansas Jayhawks, Southern Miss, UAB, and the Green Bay Packers.

The new coach recently detailed the unique approach he will bring to training. Woodfin described his style as “blue-collar” and “cutting edge.”

“The simplest way to describe our style is blue-collar, and it’s cutting edge,” Woodfin said, per Jim Wyatt. “It’s the perfect balance between those two.

“Blue-collar in the nature of, this is a very physical, violent game, and you have to train hard. There is no way you can train soft and play hard. So, the training has to be hard training at times.

“The cutting-edge part is the assessment, using the technologies that we have, that we brought in with our sports science department, to assess our guys, to know: ‘Are there asymmetries to understand what the things are they really need in order to improve their performance?’ Because everybody is different, and having a very individual training plan for each one of our guys based on the position they play, based on the needs that they gave.”

This will certainly sound nice to Titans fans, who grew tired of seeing Titans’ players consistently appear on the injury report. Under Callahan, the Titans have expanded the sports performance department.

In addition to hiring Woodfin, the Titans also added Mark Lovat, Grant Thorne, and John Shaw. Lovat and Thorne were hired as assistant strength and conditioning coaches while Shaw was hired as a speed training coach. That group of coaches joins holdovers Brian Bell (Assistant Director of Sports Performance) and Haley Roberts (Sports Performance Assistant).

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Titans’ Brian Callahan talks ‘really important hire’ of Zac Woodfin

Titans head coach Brian Callahan recently touched on the hire of director of sports performance, Zac Woodfin.

The Tennessee Titans recently hired Zac Woodfin as their new director of sports performance, replacing Frank Piraino, who the team parted ways with earlier this offseason after firing Mike Vrabel and hiring Brian Callahan.

The change is significant for the Titans, a team that has been one of the most injured in the NFL over the past few seasons and desperately needed to go in a different direction.

Before being hired by the Titans, Woodfin served as the director of player performance and wellness for the United Football League. He has also had multiple stints as a strength and conditioning coach at the college level.

While down at the NFL owners meetings last week, Callahan touched on what he considers a “really important hire.”

“That was a really important hire and I waited until the end of it so I could really spend all my attention focused on who the best person for that role would be, and Zac [Woodfin] has knocked it out of the park,” he said, according to Jim Wyatt. “He’s fantastic. A ton of really interesting experiences.”

The Titans are keeping two members of Vrabel’s strength and conditioning staff in assistant director of sports performance, Brian Bell, and sports performance assistant, Haley Roberts.

Callahan is excited about keeping them aboard, and with the new people that Woodfin is bringing in. He also noted how the overall group is diverse in terms of being able to focus on different aspects of training, etc.

“What I think is really cool is the guys that he brought with him,” Callahan added. “We had two people with Haley and Brian Bell that I think are really fantastic coaches and people that we wanted to keep. He had a couple of guys that he wanted to bring with him. I think we’ve done a really good job of dividing that department. We have someone that’s going to do the sports science, we have someone that’s going to do the speed, we have a head coach. I think we’ve made that program a little bit more robust with adding some more pieces and some more knowledge to try to do the best we can to keep those guys getting stronger, faster, and stay healthier.”

After the kinds of injury issues Tennessee has had, Woodfin and Co. have a tall task on their hands. The good news is, there’s nowhere to go but up from here.

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