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Vlad works with YSU athletes on strength
By Greg Gulas
BOARDMAN
When an athlete needs an individualized strength and conditioning curriculum, Liz Vlad is their go-to person at Youngstown State.
Hired as the Penguins’ assistant strength and conditioning coach, the Boardman native works with the soccer, softball, women’s swimming, men’s and women’s golf, men’s and women’s tennis programs, and men’s and women’s track and field teams.
She has developed water-based workouts for the track and field athletes, created the YSU Women’s Team Challenge to promote fitness and continues to run strength and conditioning program camps for high school athletes.
Vlad told the Curbstone Coaches at the Blue Wolf Banquet Center during Monday’s weekly luncheon, that it has been a labor of love. Her gratification comes when watching the improvement of the athletes with whom she is working.
“You design an individual program knowing full well that it might have to be tweaked over the course of their workouts,” she said. “You must be able to adjust to one’s individual needs, whether it is in season or during their offseason training.”
Vlad joined YSU in June 2002 under then-strength and conditioning coach Todd Burkey, and is now the lone full-time assistant to John Patrick.
She is presented new challenges every day.
“I just want to use all of the resources available to me in order to give the athletes what they need,” she said.
Vlad also serves as a fitness specialist at the Youngstown YMCA.
She has been with the YMCA since 1999, serving as a spinning instructor, a civil service and senior weight training and fitness instructor and aquatic exercise therapist.
She has a certification from Ohio State as a nuclear medicine technologist and worked for seven years at Presbyterian Hospitals of Dallas, Texas, before spending a year at Warren General Hospital.
In both capacities, she handled cardiac stress testing and other diagnostic testing and imaging.
Vlad, who earned her BS in Exercise Physiology from YSU, said the reward comes when an athlete buys into the program, and then works hard to achieve his or her goal.
“We had one softball player, McKenzie Bedra, give me her game ball because she said it was all due to what she gained in speed and power.
“Other athletes have given me sentimental statues or personal mementos; not because I was helping them but because I had also become their friend.”
The weekly luncheon will resume in the September.