The Point Loma Nazarene University athletic department has a fresh but familiar face heading the strength and conditioning program. Following the departure of coach Erik Pedersen, Karol Zak has been hired as the new PLNU strength and conditioning coach. Zak has worked at PLNU in the past and brings with him more than four years of experience as a strength and conditioning coach.
Zak obtained his master’s degree in Kinesiology and Exercise Science from PLNU in 2022. In that time, he served as a graduate assistant strength and conditioning coach. He returned in January of 2023 for a brief stint as the assistant strength and conditioning coach, working alongside Pedersen. Zak would like to keep the culture Pedersen and the late Ethan Hamilton, former athletic director, helped lay the groundwork for before Zak was hired.
“He always wants to make it a fun environment, he always wants the athletes to have a good time; and that was something Ethan [Hamilton] also wanted,” Zak said. “It was more about the athlete’s experience here than it was about the performance. Obviously, we care about the performance. But there’s a lot that goes into performance on the emotional side of things, too.”
Coming with Zak is Garrett Ennis, the newly hired assistant strength and conditioning coach. Ennis received his bachelor’s degree in Kinesiology: sports performance, from Cal Baptist University in 2023. Ennis worked as a strength and conditioning intern at CBU and served as a personal trainer for CBU Recreation. With PLNU, he oversees the men’s and women’s basketball teams as well as the cross country and track teams. Ennis emphasized the importance of tailoring athlete’s exercises and workouts to certain, specific skills and muscles used when playing their respective sport.
“They understand what we do in here [the weight room] is not to make them better weight lifters,” Ennis said. “What we do in here, is to make them better athletes in their respective sports.”
Beyond helping maintain a positive culture within athletics, Zak and Ennis are changing the way the strength and conditioning program operates. Zak is implementing a technique that’s well-known in the sports training world, but completely new for PLNU: velocity-based training. Essentially, when athletes are doing their exercises, there will be technology to tell them how quickly they’re moving the weight. That way, players can get a better understanding of how much weight they feel comfortable with. Also, dips or spikes in velocity may indicate how fatigued the player is.
“The way velocity-based training works is there’s a correlation between one rep max weight or repetitions and the speed of the bar,” Zak said. “At 85%, we can correlate that to the speed of the bar. So now what we’re getting is a stimulus. We can prescribe a stimulus based on that percentage… it makes our jobs easier but also brings more to a weight room.”
However, the stimulus and intensity with which the athletes train has to vary from offseason to in-season.
“If we get these athletes super strong or super fast or super powerful, we want to keep that alive during the regular season, but we can’t fatigue them like crazy in the weight room, so we change our intensities and introduce different stimuli for them to maintain those aspects we brought up in the offseason,” Ennis said.
Maddie Mersch, a third-year applied health science major on the women’s basketball team, has already felt the positive impact of the new strength and conditioning staff. She’s noticed a change in the workouts and has enjoyed working with Ennis, someone who has basketball experience and has trained basketball players before.
“I’ve noticed a huge difference,” Mersch said. “Even in the few weeks that we’ve had him, I’ve felt different types of movements, stuff that’s actually benefiting me in practice.”
PLNU athletics is coming off an extremely successful year, one that included the Sea Lions’ first ever national title, won by the women’s soccer team. The men’s baseball team made another appearance in the Division 2 College World Series. The women’s volleyball team won the PacWest conference, as did the men’s soccer team and men’s basketball team (co-champions with Academy of Art). The women’s basketball team made it to the NCAA tournament, as did the men’s and women’s tennis teams.
With all this to say, PLNU can rest assured knowing their strength and conditioning coach, Karol Zak, wants to be here, and wants to build on that success.
“Point Loma has always spoken to me… I’ve always wanted to be here at Point Loma,” Zak said. “In the first meeting that we had with Erik [Pedersen], he had asked us, ‘What do you guys want to do? What’s your career path?’ I looked at him in his face and I said, ‘I’m gunning for your seat.’ That was week one when I was here and I finally got it.”
Luke Mallery