With football in a nebulous position and the recruiting process in a relative holding pattern, we at Golden Bear Report are looking to do interviews wherever we can. This week, we got Cal head strength and conditioning coach Torre Becton on to talk about how he got into strength and conditioning.

This is the first part of the interview with Becton.

TT: What sports did you play growing up?

TB: First sport for everybody growing up in North Carolina is usually basketball, so we all got outside and played basketball, you have Michael Jordan, you have North Carolina vs. Duke and the ACC, and we all played basketball first. Then, you start growing into the position or the sport that you’re gonna play, and I grew up and I grew out more. It went from basketball to football, then a little bit of wrestling to help me with football. I threw the shot and discus in high school too.

TT: How do you feel playing basketball, football, some track and some wrestling influenced you today?

TB: The first thing that it did is that it gave me some things to do to stay out of trouble, little known fact, coach Becton was also a boy scout, troop 361. What it did is that it gave me an opportunity to stay out of trouble, it occupied my time, it gave me some of the structure that I needed as a young man, as a kid actually. A lot of times, not to get too much into it, my mom worked a lot. My mom worked two jobs and there was a lot of time where as a 10-14 year old, I’m the structure in the house, I’m the dad taking care of my sister, helping her get to and from school and with homework. When I got an opportunity to do sports, it allowed me to be a kid, have some structure, allowed me to have some fun.

TT: Do you feel like some of that structure you built then has helped today, keeping essentially 120 kids structured today?

TB: Yeah, I definitely do, just being a big football fan first of all, and investing as much as I did into football in my younger years, obviously investing as much as I do into football now along with a little military influence from my family (in creating the structure), a lot of my family members are active military, even retired military, some of the cousins I grew up with already retired from the military.

Going to college wasn’t the prominent thing in my family, we were a military family, you graduated high school, you’d go into the military, you’d put your 20-25 years in and you’d go into the next thing, but I was always bigger than everybody else, I was blessed with some ability to run a little bit, so I got opportunities to play football after high school instead of going into the military.

But those influences and naturally, the discipline, having those influences around with my cousins and my uncles, some of my female cousins and female members, it was our thing.

TT: You went to go play football at North Carolina A&T, how did you end up there?

TB: It was a school in the recruiting process where I felt the most comfortable, I felt the home atmosphere, I felt the family vibe with the coaches and teammates and felt a connection to the campus. Whenever you meet anyone from North Carolina A&T, you say ‘Aggie Pride’ and he smiles and you’re going to get an amazing reaction from him. It was the place I connected with best and the quickest, I didn’t have any connection there as far as family members, but it was the right place for me…

TT: And from your Cal bio, it said you were the first one in your family to go to college…

TB: Again, most people in my family were military, grew up in a small town in North Carolina, hard working people, and hard working people believe in working hard, you prepare yourself sometimes ‘oh you graduated high school, you checked that box, it’s time to start working hard,’ and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, but I saw my path being a little bit different, with football. I was one of those kids who, everytime you got a report card, it says ‘can handle work but doesn’t apply himself.’

So I was that kid, I was smart enough to do better but I wasn’t motivated enough in my school so much as a youngster. But some of my high school coaches saw that I had some ability and really took their time to teach me the sport, teach me the game of football, they did a really good job of nurturing me the best they could.

TT: When did that passion for football turn into a passion for coaching, and specifically strength and conditioning?

TB: Funny thing is, most guys get into strength and conditioning because they were good at lifting weights, they were naturals, they were strong, I wasn’t (laughs). I wasn’t a strong kid when I was in college, but what happened was, the way that I’m naturally wired is that I create balance. Whenever there’s something lacking, I try to fill in that spot. In my college career, from a developmental standpoint, we didn’t have a full-time strength and conditioning coach. That was a void, with how I saw my college career as I got into my senior year, I was like ‘wow, if I had some development up to this point, you’d never know how good I could have been, you’d never know where I could end up in football,’ but because we didn’t have that constant, on-going presence and guidance, all the things that the strength and conditioning coach provides, there was a part of me that feels like I missed a little bit.

With that, I was getting my degree in fitness and wellness management, so I was learning a lot of exercise science, a lot of kinesiology, those types of things and I started to practice on myself. I saw that it helped me out. I had a couple knee issues in college, I had some meniscus issues that I constantly had to rehab from, in my mind, strengthening my VMO (Vastus Medialis Obliquus), strengthening my hamstring, my hips, those were the things I looked at. I was like ‘you know what, if I had somebody who could have helped me with this, it really could have pushed my career along.’ That’s where it started to form initially.

TT: How did you end up at Oklahoma State after being solely in North Carolina prior to that?

TB: I graduated in December of 2000, and at that point, ironically enough, A&T had just hired their first strength coach in January of 2001. Christina Langi was her name, she’s actually a dietician now, but was their first strength and conditioning coach full time, and Jonathan Sherborne, I came around and was like ‘hey, you guys need some help?’ The guy was like ‘yeah I could use some help,’ Christina was like ‘sure, you can jump in and help out.’ I had three jobs at the time, I was an intern strength and conditioning coach, trying to learn as much as I could. I sold cell phones for Sprint, I was the guy in Best Buy with the red polo and khakis trying to peddle cell phones to people, and I was a personal trainer at a gym, Pyramid’s Downtown Training Center in Greensboro, North Carolina. I had three jobs and I was trying to make it, and anytime I had some free time I figured I might as well travel to some big-time colleges in ACC country and figure out what those strength and conditioning staffs were doing.

So on days off or downtime, I’d get a hold of some of the strength coaches at the University of North Carolina, NC State, Duke, Wake Forest, I’d travel and bug the crap out of those guys, learned a lot and made some connections. One of those connections was John Williams (Jr.), Big John Williams, he’s the head strength coach at East Carolina now, he was the head strength coach at Baylor and Kansas. He was an assistant at North Carolina, we developed a really tight bond, we had the same birthday, our hometowns in North Carolina are 20 minutes apart, I went to high school with his wife, didn’t know her, we drove the exact same vehicle, same color, and we pledged the same fraternity, everything. He became my mentor and was the best man at my wedding.

He was an assistant at North Carolina and saw that I would drive down there to Chapel Hill, be on time, and would be eager to learn things, and a couple times the head strength coach stood me up, and during those times John and I had an opportunity to develop our relationship. John got the job at Baylor and he was going to move to Waco, Texas, he was like ‘hey, I don’t have anything for you now until you get more experience, but there’s an opportunity for you to go to Oklahoma State as a graduate assistant.’ He had come to North Carolina from Oklahoma State and he connected me with Dan Austin, who was the head strength coach at Oklahoma State, Austin offered me a job, and I was a grad assistant at Oklahoma State.

TT: Then you got the experience you needed and headed to Baylor?

TB: I was at Oklahoma State for a year and a half, a year and some months, and from there John hired me at Baylor, I spent four years with him at Baylor going through the rigors of learning how to be a strength and conditioning coach. It’s really interesting when your boss is your mentor and he has a vested interest in you, your life tends to be quite a bit harder than other guys on the staff in my opinion. From Baylor I went to Iowa State for two years, after Iowa State I went to the Houston Texans, which was a really unique experience. One year with the Houston Texans, then I went and had the opportunity to be a head strength coach for the first time, went to a small school to cut my teeth, and I ended up as the head strength coach at South Carolina State for a year and a half.

At some point you really want to learn and see if what you learned works, so I took the job at South Carolina State for a year and a half, and I ended up at Washington.

TT: And I’m assuming that’s where you got to know Justin Wilcox?

TB: Yeah, coach Wilcox and coach Sirmon, I got there in 2011 and those two guys came in in 2012, and you know coach Wilcox, he’s not a social butterfly, but we did spend two years at the University of Washington. Not a lot of conversations, I think I may have had two or three really good conversations, but to that point, I think he watched how it worked and appreciated and liked how it worked, saw how I hopefully impacted the athletes.

Justin Wilcox, Part One | Justin Wilcox, Part Two | Charlie Ragle, Part One | Charlie Ragle, Part Two | Peter Sirmon, Part One | Peter Sirmon, Part Two | Aristotle Thompson, Part One | Aristotle Thompson, Part Two | Angus McClure, Part One | Angus McClure, Part Two | Tim DeRuyter, Part One | Tim DeRuyter, Part Two | Andrew Browning, Part One | Andrew Browning, Part Two | Burl Toler, Part One | Burl Toler, Part Two | Bill Musgrave | Marques Tuiasosopo, Part One | Marques Tuiasosopo, Part Two