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Michigan basketball strength coach Matt Aldred has a message for his players

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6 months ago

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Michigan basketball strength coach Matt Aldred has a message for his players

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It was the middle of August 2017 when former Michigan basketball coach John Beilein phoned into a Lansing radio show.

Though he did not know he would lead the Wolverines to their second national championship game appearance in five years less than eight months later, he knew the success he’d cultivated in the U-M basketball program was not solely because of him. Not by a long shot.

“Coaches get way too much credit for any success we’ve had,” Beilein said that day. “(Head strength and conditioning coach) Jon Sanderson is a huge part of this. All the NBA draft choices we’ve had, he’s a huge part.

“In the summer, he’s our most important assistant coach. The strength coach can be with players six hours a week; we can only be with them two. Over 16 weeks, that’s a big difference. If we’re going to be good, it will be because we have strength in numbers and great attitudes all the way up and down (the) roster.”

Nearly a decade later, the faces have changed, but the reality remains.

For the first time since the Beilein era, the U-M hoops program has someone new in charge of the strength staff. Matt Aldred coached alongside new head coach Dusty May at Florida in 2017-18 before spending the past six years at Furman serving as both assistant head coach and director of basketball performance.

Aldred recently spoke with the team’s play-by-play voice Brian Boesch on Michigan athletics’ podcast “Defend The Block,” and said he was quite happy in his old position and wasn’t looking for change. But that was before he saw one of his mentors take over the top spot in Ann Arbor.

After an initial congratulations message, Aldred, a new father, realized he kept finding himself daydreaming about the possibilities when a program with the reach of U-M hires a coach with the acumen of May. He felt he could help put it over the top.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about, honestly, ‘Would he take me?’” Aldred said on the podcast. “Is that something that I think he would entertain because of our relationship and prior work experience? And then I was like, OK — this was on like a Sunday night — I was like, I’ll wait until Wednesday. Like, I’ve just texted him congrats. I’ll wait.

“Then it got to Monday, I was like, ‘Ah, you gotta text.’ So I text him on the Tuesday, said, ‘Hey, like, I would be really interested in this role.'”

On May 13, U-M announced Aldred had officially replaced Sanderson, now the head strength coach for Illinois basketball.

Aldred is part of an entirely new staff under May — alongside assistant coaches Mike Boynton, Justin Joyner and Akeem Miskdeen, general manager Kyle Church, director of player development Drew Williamson and special assistant to the head coach Brandon Gilbert — that will oversee nine new players and three returners.

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For Aldred, everyone is a new face with the exception of May. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, however.

Aldred said one of his main focuses and core beliefs is “individualized training” — rather than the entire team going through general workouts as a group, each person can work on exercises for their particular skills.

“I’ve got to learn about what they’ve done,” Aldred explained. “Previous injury history, previous training history, what they want to achieve, who their favorite NBA player is, like what their physical goals are. So a lot of it after the initial, ‘Hi, how you doing? Nice to meet you,’ I could sit down at this desk and do the work: ‘How can I individualize these (training) programs as quick as I can for these guys?'”

Aldred said he’d reached a solid balance with Furman head coach Bob Richey, who allowed Aldred to run the conditioning program his own way. While there will be a learning curve at U-M, with more tools, technology, and moneys now at his disposal, Aldred’s belief is he and May will be able to find that in Ann Arbor, too.

“I want to use the same system I’ve used, because I know the metrics inside and out,” he said. “If I have a Week 1 staff meeting with Coach May, I can tell him exactly what the practice loads would look like and inform his decision-making there. It was really looking at getting force plates, some tracking system on the court, heart rate.

“And then we’ve got a full-time performance dietician. That’s amazing as well, after spending so much time at a mid-major level.”

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It’s a new era around the Michigan basketball program; one marked both with optimism for the future and an embracing of the past. Earlier in June, the team had a post on X (formerly Twitter) showing former star point guard Trey Burke on campus interacting with May.

Aldred is allowed six hours with each athlete per week in the summer by NCAA bylaw and plans on making the most out of it. His main requirement? That the players want it even more than he does.

“I want this to be the best experience they’ve ever had, in terms of player development in the weight room and on the court, and I want it to be a relationship where they feel like they’re in the driver’s seat and I’m in the passenger seat,” Aldred said. “I can’t be in the driver’s seat for players. I can’t be dragging them in here for these sessions. They gotta want to come in here, so we gotta make this a place of development, not a place of pain and struggle.

“Yeah, it’s gonna be hard, but anything you want to do in life that’s worth doing is gonna be hard.”

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