Street: How long have you been working here?
Jim Steel: Since February of '99, but I've been coaching since '89 in North Carolina.
Street: Are you an athlete yourself?
JS: I played front line at football in college. That's how I got interested in weight training, because I used to lead the workouts for the team.
Street: And I hear you also do poetry readings in your spare time.
JS: [laughs] I write poetry, mostly free verse. I have a webpage and everything.
Street: What kind of poetry?
JS: It's mostly pretty dark.
Street: About violent athletic injuries?
JS: No, it's not violent.
Street: So how does your literary side relate to your athletic coaching?
JS: There's no correlation whatsoever.
Street: You don't ever try to give pep talks in iambic pentameter?
JS: Well, sometimes we do this thing I got from Tony Robbins where you clap your hands, jump up and down and yell, "I feel great today!"
Street: Sounds fun. Is there a big difference between working with men and women?
JS: The biggest thing is trying to get the female teams to understand that our programs are not designed to get them more muscular. When a lot of the women first got here, everyone's like, "I don't want to get bigger, I don't want to get bigger, I don't want to get bigger," so I have to convince a lot of teams that our programs are just designed to get them stronger and to prevent injuries.
Street: Like how? Do you ever try to get inside your athletes' heads?
JS: I never really try to get in their heads, but sometimes it helps to try to get them fired up. Certain football players respond well to anger. Some other kids, you can appeal to their senses of achievement. When I first started coaching, I would be negative with the guys to get them fired up, but it puts that negativity in their minds. It's like, someone tells you not to think about a pink elephant, and the first thing you think about is a pink elephant.
Street: So you try to keep it positive?
JS: Yeah, I don't want people to come in here and say, "Man this sucks, I dread coming in here every day." We try to make it fun.
Street: How do athletes coordinate their training with their academic schedules?
JS: We know that class comes first here. I mean, other places, basically if you had a 2.0 and a 700 on your SATs you could get in, and kids don't have anything to fall back on. Here, if a kid says they've got a lab or an assignment, that's what comes first. We know we're not going to produce a bunch of pro-athletes. Kids go on to Wall Street, or become lawyers. We just give 'em their workouts.
