Student athletes walk to the weight room across from the gym to begin a second type of workout, aside from their usual practice. As they walk in, they are greeted by strength and conditioning coach Tanner Schroer, who begins by giving the athletes their exercises for the day on the TeamBuildr app, and the students begin on their workout. Schroer pumps up the athletes with music of their choice and helps them through their workout. 

New strength and conditioning coach Schroer joined the Revere Staff this year. He works full time in the building and has recently implemented an app into his workouts. 

Principal Dr. Andy Peltz and Athletic Director Don Seeker began working on a project last December examining Revere’s Strength and Conditioning Program along with the weight room. Peltz and Seeker talked to parents and student athletes about the previous program and what could be improved in the weight room. Peltz explained a common theme throughout the survey. 

“One of the things that popped up more frequently was [that the students] liked the consistent person over a group of people. They wanted a point person not a group; that led to us exploring the model of having one person over a group,” Peltz said. 

After multiple surveys and meetings with parents, the Board of Education, along with Peltz and Seeker, decided a change should be made and hired Schroer to work at the school all day as one body focused on one thing: Revere’s athletics. Peltz, a former coach, realizes the importance of different training for different sports and genders and highlights how Schroer emphasizes its importance. 

“In our conversations [Schroer] was able to bring up multiple examples, not only difference in sports, but difference in genders, and really was able to dig down from our emerging seventh and eighth grade and freshman athletes developmentally compared to our seniors. He was able to speak highly about what type of exercise would be appropriate for a thirteen, fourteen year old to a seventeen, eighteen year old,” Peltz said. 

Along with hiring Schroer, Peltz and Seeker worked together to buy new equipment for the weight room. During the 2021-2022 school year many female athletes were injured on the lower half of their bodies, so the new equipment focuses to ease this issue. Seeker explained the type of equipment Revere is buying. 

“We are actually in the process of ordering 32,000 dollars worth of [equipment]. Basically we ordered lower extremity things, bands, balls. A lot of the stuff was suggestions and recommendations from the parent group we met with. Lower half stuff, because we had injuries to the girls, and also, for all of our athletes, we didn’t have too much for lower half extremities,” Seeker said. 

Before getting hired at Revere, Schroer worked at the University of Akron as a strength and conditioning coach for women’s basketball and soccer and assisted with men’s soccer. One of the reasons he left Akron, Schroer explained, was to help the development stage of high school athletes. As Peltz pointed out, different ages need different exercises, and Schroer is excited to help younger athletes before they could become seriously injured. 

“I think I could have a larger impact on more athletes. . . I had a lot of athletes show up to college with [injured] ACLs because they [injured] them in high school; I felt like I could help out before it gets to that point. Then, more kids could go to college without injuries,” Schroer said. 

Schroer got into strength and conditioning as a young athlete, where he felt the weight room was a place to always see improvement from hard work. 

“I really enjoyed working out. I was a mediocre athlete, so I took to the weight room because it was an equalizer; as long as I worked hard, I saw progress, and it wasn’t always the same on the field. I enjoyed being rewarded by seeing weight on the bar go up,” Schroer said. 

He felt fulfilled as a student athlete and wanted the same return for others around him. This led to Schroer becoming a strength and conditioning coach, he wanted to see others feel the same success he felt as weight was added to the bar. 

“I like that it teaches gratification. I like the feeling of empowerment that athletes get when they continuously see progress and when they see or surprise themselves with how strong they are,” Schroer said. 

Schroer also added that he likes to see when new athletes come to strength training for the first time and progress in the weight room. 

Schroer uses the online app TeamBuildr to share his specific programs with different teams. For an athlete’s first time at a strength workout, Schroer helps the student download the app and shows them how to record reps and scroll through the exercises for that day. An athlete can see the amount of reps, sets and circuits they have and can record how much weight they used or reps they did. Schroer explained where he learned about the app and how to use it. 

“My professor [at Ohio Northern University] started a strength and conditioning bachelor’s degree, and one of the classes we took was about technology in strength and conditioning, so we got familiarized with certain things like TeamBuildr,” Schroer said. 

Schroer, before purchasing the app, talked to a few other strength and conditioning coaches and got good feedback. Another feature on the app is a leaderboard between different sports. The football coaches bought a physical record board for the weight room specifically for football players. For other athletes though, Schroer explained there is an option on the app to see the records of athletes in all different sports. 

The TeamBuildr app does not just create the programs for Schroer though; it is his job to concoct all the different programs for the different sports. Schroer explained the different aspects he looks at in creating the workouts. 

“When I go about creating a program, I first look at logistical restraints: what kind of equipment I have, the size of my weight room, my number of athletes, and from there I determine how I want the workout to flow through the room. If there’s a lot of athletes in the room, I have to be a little more cautious about equipment usage and how I pair exercises,” Schroer said. 

After he figures out the logistics, Schroer can move on to injuries or other complications in a sport or athlete. 

“I manipulate sets and reps based on best practice that’s been studied [and] based on my own experience depending on the competition.  If the best practice were to state that three sets of five reps for a sport was best or something like that, I would manipulate that if you had a competition one day,” Schroer said.

Schroer takes into account if a team has a game or meet the next day so the athletes will not be tired or weak for their competition. A big issue for Schroer is injuries for different athletes. He spends time in the field house speaking to the trainers about different injuries and considers them in his workout plans. 

“I just work around it the best I can. If it’s an injury that I know we should just leave alone entirely, I’ll just adjust the workouts to avoid anything that would challenge that area. Otherwise, if it’s just something like tendinitis, certain things like that actually improve with exercise, so I would actually give special exercises just for them,” Schroer said. 

Schroer hopes to later on implement students who are not in a sport a program to get in the weight room and continue exploring the TeamBuildr app as more athletes feel comfortable with it and the weight room.