For Lindsey Kirschman, it’s all about the next challenge

By Natalie Newton

 

The first time that University of Utah basketball assistant coach Dasia Young saw Lindsey Kirschman, the reaction was visceral. 

“When I first seen her, I was like ‘dang, she’s jacked, like she’s ripped,’” Young said. 

It’s not easy to create a body that looks like that. It’s even harder to maintain it at 37 years old. But Kirschman loves a challenge.

Now in her third season as the director of sports performance for women’s basketball at the University of Utah, Kirschman’s current challenge is keeping the team in shape. That includes daily workouts, lifts, conditioning, or anything else she thinks the athletes need.

Much of this work happens when no one is watching. In the summertime, college basketball players are restricted by NCAA rules that govern how much they can be practicing on a court, so that’s when they spend the most time strength training to prepare for the upcoming season.

The workouts can be grueling. But Kirschman never asks anything of a player that she wouldn’t do—or that she wouldn’t actually be excited to do. 

“A lot of my hobbies involve physical discomfort,” she said. “My best days are the days where I am just physically exhausted at the end of them.”

That’s what assistant coach Jordan MacIntyre said the players need, too. 

“We play a really fast, up-tempo style of basketball, and we have to be able to get up and down the floor and be in our best physical shape to play the brand that we want to play,” MacIntyre said. “That is so much of a credit to the work that she puts in with people outside of our season.”  

All of that effort permits the team “the ability to play the style we want to play,” MacIntyre said.

Kirschman’s days have early starts. She wakes up around 4 a.m., reads, journals, goes on a run with her dog, works until 2 p.m., does her own workout, and then goes to bed around 9:30 p.m. She’ll often go to the athletic facility at four or five in the morning to do the workout that she’s planning on putting her athletes through later that day.

“She actually knows what she’s talking about which is nice, because, you know, sometimes strength and conditioning coaches don’t look like what they preach,” Young said.

Even though she’s often already gone through the workout, Kirschman doesn’t hesitate to jump in alongside the players. At a team lift in late February, for instance, she was stretching, planking, and demonstrating different exercises to athletes who needed help. The workout culminated in Kirschman pushing a sled that carried 6-foot-2-inch sophomore forward Alyssa Blanck across 20 yards of turf while the team cheered on the sideline.

“I know that they see her own drive. She can have them do whatever in their workouts because they know she’s doing it too, and she’s probably done it already before we’ve done it,” MacIntyre said. “That absolutely motivates them and she has such an element of respect because of it.”

Strength coaches at the collegiate and professional levels often have degrees in athletic training, kinesiology or sports medicine. Kirschman, on the other hand, earned her bachelor's degree in environmental science at the University of Washington, where she also competed in track and field.

She then began graduate school for rangeland management. During this period, she started coaching at a high school in her free time and found herself pulled back to the world of sports.

“I would sneak out every afternoon to go volunteer coach at a high school in town,” Kirschman said. But soon she thought, “Why am I sneaking around to do something that I could just do for my job?”

After this realization, she switched programs to start studying education. After finishing her master’s program, she taught science and coached track and field, cross country, and strength and conditioning at Poudre High School in Fort Collins, Colorado.

“I think a lot of my own coaches have been role models and that’s part of the reason of why I wanted to be a coach, because as an athlete I thought about who has had the biggest impact in my life in a positive way and it’s always coaches,” Kirschman said. “I wanted to be that for other athletes.”

Kirschman taught and coached for eight years in Colorado. Eventually she began thinking about how she could take herself to the next level. Being a high school strength coach often means having a lot of teams to oversee, and Kirschman grew tired of that high volume of athletes.

“I was coaching before school, teaching all day, coaching after school, coaching all summer, but I had hundreds of athletes,” she said. “You can only do so much with each one individual athlete when you’ve got 300 more coming.”

Eventually, she felt like she had reached her ceiling in that role. 

A new opportunity presented itself at the University of Central Arkansas, where she was hired to be the assistant strength and conditioning coach. Kirschman took a 50% pay cut to switch jobs — and was still training hundreds of athletes — but the prospect of a new mountain to climb was more enticing than the risk of failure.

“The challenge of that was appealing to me. I wanted to be held accountable to the highest standard possible, and have that risk of, if you're not good at your job you're gonna get fired,” Kirschman said. “It’s kind of hard to fire someone at the high school level… I want to see if I have what it takes to hang.”

Kirschman’s teaching experience has been a benefit.

“She comes with a lot of different experiences that a lot of other strength coaches don't have… she does a lot of teaching of exercises,” Utah women’s basketball athletic trainer Christina Jones said. “She has all of those fundamentals down very well and can connect with the athletes and really hones into the teaching aspect, which I think is pretty unique.”

After one season in Arkansas she was hired by the University of Utah women’s basketball program. In Utah, she finally got her wish of working with athletes on an individual level.

“First time in my career that I only had one team to work with,” she said. “I went from working with 300-plus athletes to working with 14, and that’s been a huge blessing and learning experience.”

Her one-on-one work with athletes doesn’t go unnoticed. Jones noted that Kirschman is especially focused when it comes to injured players. Any time the team is on the road, she gets up early with the athletes who are injured to put them through a workout in the hotel gym before breakfast.

“I think it’s a cool thing that she does, and the ability to adapt and be able to do that in the hotel,” Jones said. “It’s hard to do that when your other teammates aren’t doing that when you’re hurt.”

It’s that kind of attentiveness and care that give Kirschman one of her greatest strengths as a coach. She has an innate kindness, an ability to make connections with people, that lifts her to the next level. Anyone who works with or plays for Kirschman will sooner or later be likely to receive a valentine in their locker, a note, a treat she’s baked, or a moment where she genuinely checks in because she cares.

“She’s probably one of the most, if not the most, kind-hearted people I’ve ever worked with, let alone met,” MacIntyre said. “She really is someone that cares to be there for other people, and wants her impact to be so much more than just teaching people how to get stronger.”

Kirschman has been able to find the harmony in challenging people to be their best while still loving them fiercely, a critical thing for someone in her job. She’s able to get the best results from people because they know that whatever she’s asking them to do, she’s doing it with their best interests at heart.

“Just knowing that she actually cares, as an athlete I think that’s really important, really crucial for a teacher-student role. Nobody’s ever going to listen to their teacher if they don’t like them, or if they don’t believe in what they do,” Young said. “I think she mastered that perfectly. To get people to do hard things and enjoy it at the same time.”

Kirschman knows that players respect her because she is a good strength coach but, she said, “people love me because of the impact I have on their lives and in their heart and that I have a relationship with them.”

That love can be leveraged into the sort of trust she needs, from her athletes, to get them to do things they might not do themselves. 

“She just always made sure that we didn't settle. I could be curling 25s and she’s like ‘babe you can definitely go to 40.’ I’m like ‘I could but do I want to?’ and she’ll come pick up those 40s and hand them to me,” Young said. “I can do more. That’s probably what I took away from her the most: that I can do more. Whatever that is.”