It was a banner season for these young women with the help of BFS

River Ridge High It was a banner season for these young women with the help of BFS iver Ridge High School is in Patch Grove, Wisconsin, and serves 210 students. This may not seem noteworthy until you understand that the student/teacher ratio is 13 to 1 and the school has a 98 percent graduation rate. What’s also impressive is their girls basketball program. Despite having had only a 14-7 record during the regular season, the Timberwolves went on to beat three number-one seeds and compete in the state championship title game against a team with a 28-1 record in the regular season. Congratulations go to Caron Townsend and her staff for a job well done.

An important member of that staff is strength coach Joe Schulte. To put his athletes in the best possible position to win, Schulte implemented the BFS program. To make certain he was doing it right, he brought BFS clinician Lance Neven to River Ridge for a clinic in June 2009. In his own words, here is a letter Schulte sent to us describing how the Timberwolves achieved such remarkable success:

From: Joe Schulte, Strength Coach Subject: River Ridge Girls Basketball Season 2010/2011 I would first like to thank Lance all the help and support they have given to River Ridge girls basketball along with all the other sports that have participated in the BFS program. I would also like to thank John Hoch and the Lancaster football program for teaching me the BFS system and its benefits. I believe (as do many other coaches and athletes) that the strength training we do through BFS was a key to our playoff run and championship season this year. We started trying to implement the BFS program in girls’ basketball only. That proved to be a mistake on my part.

The program was immediately identified with girls’ basketball and nothing else. After running up against a lot of resistance to the program, we decided to have a clinic run by Lance Neven at River Ridge High School.

Megan White also competes in rodeo, as shown by this great photo provided by www.jenningsrodeophotography.com.

Lance did a great job of expressing the importance of unification and year-round training. With the support of our new athletic director, Wade Winkers, we started a unified program that has not been perfect but is continuing to grow at the school. Because of unification our girls were able to work year-round, and the results were tremendous. After reading an article in BFS magazine about the importance of upper body strength for the female athlete, we developed a significant improvement in bench press and auxiliary workouts for the girls to strengthen their upper bodies (we already had a very good system for squats, power cleans and deadlifting).

Combining the two both in season and out really made a difference in the overall strength of our girls. I know many weight coaches would say that this should have been done right away, but in our situation we were having a hard time selling 15 minutes in the weightroom during season workouts. I decided that legs trumped arms and went with the squats. After the clinic with Lance we were able to sell 30 minutes of in-season workouts, and the bench with auxiliaries were added. Among our seniors (Brittany Bradley, Megan White, Mickey Breuer and Jessica Mergen) our average bench press was over 140 pounds.

Our two juniors (Traci Kirshbaum and Angie Breuer) and our freshman (Meagan Herrick) all averaged bench presses over 120 pounds. This brought a lot of strength to the floor that definitely helped in the big playoff games and the seven-game winning streak, which ended in the State Championship game for Division 5 in the state of Wisconsin. On that trip to state, River Ridge was not ranked in the state polls and defeated the number-three-ranked team, the number-five-ranked team and the number-four-ranked team (according to Wishoops.com). The combined records of those schools were 71 and 5. River Ridge ended the season with a record of 20 wins and 8 losses.

Coach Townsend believed it was our added strength down the stretch which made the difference in many of the games. I hope the success of the girls catches fire and will spread with even more unification of our strength and training program under BFS. Thank you, Joe Schulte A commitment to the BFS program keeps the Timberwolves strong on the court.

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From BFS Magazine — May/June 2011. Part of the BFS Magazine Archive (1980–2014).