What strength coach Mark Hocke will bring to Gators' offseason program
The Journey started this week for the Florida football team and new director of strength and conditioning Mark Hocke.
UF coach Billy Napier has an eight-phase football calendar — modeled after Nick Saban’s plan at Alabama — that he calls “The Journey.”
Foundation, aka phase one, began on Tuesday. Hocke is well-versed in Napier’s plan and phases.
Like Napier, Hocke spent multiple seasons on Saban’s staff (2009-14) as an assistant strength and conditioning coach under Scott Cochran. Hocke took that blueprint with him to Georgia and Texas A&M, where he served as the head football strength and conditioning coach at both SEC schools.
During his first spring with the Aggies, Hocke met with the media to discuss the eight-phase football calendar, which Saban calls “The Process” at Alabama.
“It’s a process. It’s a year-long process. And to me, we set a standard for this new team in this first phase for the first two months,” Hocke said. “We continue to build on that in the spring. When we get back in the summer, it’s just building on what we’ve already started.”
Hocke only spent one year at UGA (2015) and A&M (2017) due to coaching changes, but worked with Napier at Louisiana from start to finish. Hocke implemented Napier’s eight-phase plan four times, getting better with each year.
So did the results on the field. After a 7-7 record in 2018, the Ragin’ Cajuns won 11 games the following season and claimed the Sun Belt title in 2020 and 2021 (outright).
Hocke now brings that success to Florida, which marks his fourth SEC program and second time in the Sunshine State. He spent 2016 at FSU as the co-associate head football strength and conditioning coach.
Hocke wants players to ‘outwork the country’
The Gators started phase one Tuesday in Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. Director of player personnel Jacob LaFrance tweeted a photo of the team stretching on the field with Hocke and his staff.
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“We’re not just developing strength and speed. We’re developing football players,” Hocke said in 2017. “Phase one, that’s the first offseason training program. And what’s exciting about that is it’s a new team. So we’re developing a new identity, developing a new attitude, a new brand of toughness, a new brand of accountability. That’s the vision.”
Hocke said the onus is on the players to not only buy into that vision, but attack it daily with their work ethic.
“What we try to do is outwork the country one day at a time,” Hocke said. “It’s the way you work every day and hold yourself accountable. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the weight room or at practice. It’s just a certain brand of work ethic and a certain brand of mental and physical toughness, a certain brand of accountability. It’s all those values, all those pillars that build something special.”
Hocke was asked to elaborate on what mental toughness means to him.
“Outworking the country. Outworking the man next to you. Having great attention to detail, having great focus after you’ve been working and grinding hard all day and all week. Bringing yourself to a threshold,” Hocke said. “Everybody who’s played sports, there’s a certain threshold you hit mentally and physically. What do you do? How do you react? What’s your focus? What’s your attention to detail once you get to that threshold? So that’s where we’re taking them. It’s that old saying, ‘Get comfortable being uncomfortable.’”
Hocke is known for his high energy, and former Georgia tight end Jay Rome can attest to that. The Bulldogs finished their year under Hocke with a 10-3 record, including a win over Penn State in the Gator Bowl.
“With Coach Hocke on the field and in the weight room, just in all aspects of life, he’s just a ball of energy,” Rome said of Hocke in a 2015 video feature. “Every time you look around, Coach Hocke is encouraging the guys, he’s doing what needs to be done to get the energy flowing between everybody on the team. And without him, it would be dull. He’s just always getting everybody live.”
