It’s 7:30 on a Tuesday morning, and while most Georgetown students are still snuggled in their beds, the football team has already been training for an hour and a half. The varsity weight room at Yates is a sea of blue-and gray athletic attire, each of the 80 players sporting a unique combination of standard-issue gear for his own look. Players grunt in encouragement and pain, a sound that combines with the nearly-constant dropping of heavy iron to create an organic soundtrack—pure man-music.
Every machine, including the elliptical, is occupied, and every player lifts something different. It looks like a jocks-gone-wild scenario—at least until the whistle blows. Then, with the precise choreography of the Moscow Ballet, everyone shifts to the next station, and it becomes clear that the chaos is, in fact, perfectly coordinated.
The man wielding the whistle is Augie Maurelli, Georgetown’s head strength and conditioning coach, who oversees training for all 27 of the school’s varsity teams. The football team’s workout, like that of each team, is tailored not just to the sport, but also to each position and each athlete. Maurelli uses a web-based application in which players enter what they have lifted so he can track progress and evaluate whether a program needs to be modified. This highly-quantified approach is no accident—Maurelli is probably among the best-pedigreed strength and conditioning coaches in the country. In addition to his training certification, he holds an undergraduate degree in engineering and biomedical physiology from Johns Hopkins and an MBA from Georgetown. At 32, his resume includes not only training work at the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins and Columbia, but also a brief stint on Wall Street and three years on the professional Olympic-style weightlifting circuit.
Maurelli could do a lot of things with those credentials, but working with Division I athletes is what he loves, and he does it with scientific meticulousness. He does a lot of it—training from 6 a.m. each weekday until well after 7 at night, in addition to making recruiting trips and attending games on the weekends. He estimates that he personally oversees the regimens of 350-400 athletes, all of whom he knows by name.
Alex Buzbee, a senior preparing for tryouts with several NFL teams by training for two extra hours a day with Augie, said that Maurelli has been a key part of his success. Buzbee came to Georgetown as a freshman defensive end at an undersized 220 lbs and now weighs in at 260. He says he is stronger and quicker than he’s ever been, a transformation he credits to the dedication and skill of the strength coach.
“I didn’t really know what weightlifting was until I met Augie,” he said admiringly.
Buzbee also emphasized how universally well-loved Maurelli is, saying players see him as a coach-friend hybrid—someone they can go to for virtually anything.
He seems to possess weight-room omnipresence, jumping seamlessly from athlete to athlete with pats of encouragement, quick inside jokes, and tips on form.
As the last four-and-half minute circuit ends, Maurelli calls the whole team into a circle around him and launches into an intense discussion of what the difficult work has meant and why they are being pushed so hard now. The players workout to a surprisingly diverse mix that includes The White Stripes and Janis Joplin, but Maurelli doesn’t need any music.
“The clanging of the weights is all the music I need,” he said.
“You gotta man up,” he declared, raising his voice to a powerful volume. “How you respond now will determine how you play next fall. This is an opportunity.”
As the players file out, they stack the weights neatly, wash their hands with Purell, and down creamy “recovery shakes.” It’s evident that Augie runs a tight ship,and that discipline has by all accounts translated into improvement. Though he can be credited at least in part with the remarkable off-season transformation of such athletes as basketball standout Roy Hibbert, Maurelli values hard work above talent, and he speaks admiringly not of the star’s dunks, but rather of his work ethic.
Maurelli is known for his ability to motivate players to achieve success as well as for his willingness to change things up a bit. On the 4th of July, he dressed up as Uncle Sam for the workout. The most memorable instance of his motivation alability, according to Buzbee, came a couple of summers ago when Augie literally tried to light a fire under his athletes’ rear-ends during the squat test.
“He picked up a chair and said ‘I’ve had this chair for 4 years and it hasn’t done anything for us. What are you gonna do for us?’” Maurelli then proceeded to destroy the chair and attempted to light it on fire, an incident which Buzbee relished as a demonstration of Augie’s burning passion.
“As stuff breaks in the weight room, we’ll usually just destroy it and give it to [the player] as a trophy,” Maurelli himself related, a little embarrassedly, with a twinkle in his eye.
He doesn’t use that sort of tactic with everyone, though. Women’s soccer coach Dave Nolan said that Maurelli has been particularly good about educating his team about the benefits of strength training since many female athletes come in with reservations about bulking up. Now, though, he can’t get them out of the weight room because they consider it so much fun.
“He coaches them like men but treats them like girls,” Nolan said approvingly. “There’s a fine line there, but he manages to do it well.”
Head football Coach Kelly said that although he has worked with strength coaches who have gone on to work in the NFL, Augie is the best he’s ever seen.
“The kids respect him, so he can get after them,” Kelly said. “When they get results, they’ll push even harder. It’s a confidence thing where they’ll get bigger, faster, stronger.”
Nolan agreed, noting that not only has his team become far less injury-prone since they’ve begun working with Maurelli, but they have also been able to compete with their physically imposing Big East competitors, who recruit “really strong girls.”
Despite his impressive personal stats, Maurelli considers the most important aspect of his job improving the performance of the team, not making them into sleek-looking physical specimens. Asked about his favorite “strength-and-conditioning movie moment,” he effuses (as much as an ex-pro weightlifter can effuse) about the sled scene in Rocky IV.
“Old-school training will definitely get you pumped,” he said excitedly.
And what about the infamous Pumping Iron?
Maurelli looks almost angry and tsk-tsks. “Body-building,” he mumbles with a disparaging shake of the head.
It’s a bit of a shock to learn that at his peak he could clean and jerk 400 pounds. Even with his current regimen of working out four times a week, Maurelli estimated that he would still be among the top-five strongest on the football team, perhaps even higher.
“I would’ve held a lot of records here,” Maurelli said. He paused and added, “We’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
