Brian Johnson's 50+ Hours of Driving to Cal

This is a continuing series from interviews with new staff members Brian Johnson, Keith Heyward, Tre Watson and Geep Chryst. Today continues with strength coach Brian Johnson's road to Cal this past winter.

New Staff Series: Gratitude a Theme | Chryst on Analytics | Watson's Persistence Paid Off | Heyward's OLB Switch and Lamar Jackson Story

Cal's new head of strength and conditioning, Brian Johnson, has had a remarkable amount of buy-in from the Cal players since his arrival in January. The team put on 595 lbs of weight throughout winter conditioning, leading into a noticeably bigger team during spring football. To get to that point, he had to drive. A lot.

"This whole situation is probably a story I’ll be telling a very long time," Johnson noted.

To set the scene, with the staff being let go at the University of Arizona, Johnson had taken the head strength and conditioning coach position at Arkansas State, which meant the normal process of packing up, moving, and leaving family to pack up the rest.

"I packed up a 10-foot Uhaul," Johnson recalled, "towed my car all the way to Jonesboro from Tucson (a 19-20 hour drive), unloaded all of that stuff into a storage unit. I was working, looking for housing, I was staying in a dorm room, on-campus apartments. My assistant (Daree Ajibade, who is now on Cal’s staff) got there a day or two after I did, both of our stuff was in the storage unit, and then I accepted this job."

Johnson took the Cal job not long after arriving in Jonesboro, which meant a second 20 hour road trip with Ajibade to get back to Tucson.

"We loaded up a Uhaul. He sold his car," Johnson noted, "he was thinking about driving it, but took it to a shop and they told him, ‘you’re not making it to Tucson.’ We both jumped in the Uhaul, drove 19+ hours to Tucson after making that drive six or seven days before that. Unloaded the Uhaul in Tucson, packed up the Uhaul stuff in a pod, then we drove 12 hours up from Tucson to Berkeley a couple days after getting back."

Johnson noted that he'd packed up some of the stuff in Tucson that required two people, but felt that his wife Angela, also a strength coach, would be able to handle the rest over the coming month before the family moved up. Johnson's family would make it up to the Bay Area around March, without the 50+ hours of driving Johnson did to get to Berkeley.

In the aftermath, and a few months removed from the marathon of travel, Johnson felt that the situation at Cal was right, enough so that he was willing to make a difficult decision of leaving a job he had just taken.

"You want to do things the right way, but in this profession, you’re here today, gone tomorrow," Johnson said, "so you have to set yourself up for the best situation. I had just accepted the job at Arkansas State and was meeting players, I was very unsure. After talking with coach Wilcox a couple of times, I interviewed with the coaching staff, I met with coach Mike Blasquez who’s a legend in this profession, then meeting some of the players on a Zoom call, it felt too right. It felt like this is where I needed to be and it made the decision very easy for me after meeting and speaking with those people."

The early returns for Johnson have been solid, with the aforementioned weight gain of the group and how the team has taken to a new nutritional plan. For the Bears' strength coach, it hasn't been about setting a specific goal for weight game, but to build them back in the aftermath of 2020.

"It wasn’t necessarily a numerical goal that we had," Johnson said, "it was to supply as much as we could within the rules, especially dealing with Covid protocols, then it was ‘let’s see what happens when they go through some of the programming.’ As the strength coach, first coming in there’s a lot of evaluating that goes into it. The way that my staff our program our lifting sessions and running sessions, the main goals were to prepare them for an early spring ball, to get them ready to practice 3-4 times a week. We also wanted to build up their bodies with the understanding that, during the Covid year, they were not able to train, we didn’t have access to the buildings, so we had to take a real ‘ground-up’ approach to what we programmed. We also had to put things in the lifts and the runs to help us evaluate each individual from how they moved, what are some of their limitations or deficiencies when it comes to movement, and what are some of the common trends as a team. Once we got that built out, and once you see the 500-600 lbs of growth, you start to realize that between what we did as a strength staff, what coach Wilcox, coach Mike Blasquez put together, what we as a team put together, we gave them exactly what they needed at the right time to become successful, to get them ready for spring ball, to build up a great foundation going into the end of spring and into the summer."

Now Johnson has the rest of the spring and summer to continue to build a team that looks to finish the job in 2021.