Welcome Warrior: FSU strength coach Lanier Coleman helps newcomers hit ground running

Editor’s Note: With preseason practice approaching next week, Warchant is profiling all five members of Florida State football’s strength and conditioning staff individually and then examining the impact of the entire group as a whole.

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Lanier Coleman would not seem like an obvious choice to serve as Florida State’s freshman welcoming committee.

In his playing days, he was listed at 6-foot-4 and over 300 pounds, and he doesn’t appear any smaller than that today.

His chest is so wide it looks like you could land a small aircraft on it. The muscles atop his shoulders resemble small mountain ranges. And when he focuses on something intently at practice, his scowl can be incredibly intimidating.

Yet when new Florida State football players are preparing to make their way to Tallahassee for the first time, it is Coleman who is tasked with making them feel comfortable.

The Seminoles’ Senior Associate Director of Football Strength & Conditioning is the team’s official “newcomer liaison,” and it’s a role he embraces.

“He does a great job of building relationships before players ever get here,” said Josh Storms, who leads the FSU strength and conditioning staff. “So when those news guys show up on campus, there’s a face and a voice they’ve already had a lot of contact with.”

Coleman, who played offensive and defensive line during his career at Louisiana-Lafayette (2004-08) and later had brief stints in the NFL, begins that process by reaching out to players shortly after they sign with the Seminoles. He first gets a feel for their personalities, and then he often reaches out to their high school strength coaches to learn more about their backgrounds.

Some of Coleman’s efforts are practical, such as providing players with the workout information they’ll need to hit the ground running when they arrive on campus. Some are more personal, like playing video games with them online to help break the ice.

It’s all with the goal of helping Florida State’s newest players get started on the right foot.

“These kids’ success is the most important thing to me,” Coleman said.

No one knows better than Coleman the impact of a quality strength coach.

When he was preparing for his second year at Louisiana, Coleman and many teammates had family members displaced by Hurricane Katrina. With their personal lives in turmoil, it was Ragin’ Cajuns strength coach Rob Phillips who reached out and provided much-needed support.

Phillips would end up being a tremendous resource and mentor throughout Coleman’s time in college, and he even helped point him toward a career in this field.

“He was huge in my life,” Coleman said. “He helped me find direction and figure out where I wanted to go. He helped me learn things like the importance of standard of work. How you go about your work, what kind of person you are spiritually, and how you lead and impact other people.

“One of the coolest things he told us was to try your hardest each day to positively impact one person’s life. Then come back the next day and try to do that again. Then come back the next day and try to do that again. If you do that, those people are going to do the same for others. And before you know it, you’ve impacted so many people.”

Like other members of Florida State’s strength and conditioning staff, Coleman originally thought his coaching career would take him to the sidelines. And he actually coached football at a small high school in Louisiana before taking an internship in 2011 under strength coach Rusty Whitt at his alma mater, Louisiana-Lafayette.

Coleman remembers Whitt starting him out with the most rudimentary of assignments: Stacking and organizing shelves filled with protein shakes, and providing basic assistance to athletes in the weight room.

And he loved every minute of it.

“I was in Heaven,” Coleman said. “I knew right away, ‘I love this job.’ I was getting paid like 200 bucks, and I was like, ‘They’re paying me to do this!'”

That was 13 years and four jobs ago, and Coleman insists he’s having as much fun as ever.

After getting his start at Lafayette, he spent the next two years on the strength and conditioning staff at Cal. Then he moved on to Ole Miss, where he worked for five years. And he left the Rebels to join Storms and head coach Mike Norvell at Florida State in 2020.

Though he didn’t have any history with either of them, Coleman insists he knew he found the right place when he heard Norvell’s first speech to the staff in early January of that year. Every message the head coach delivered, every point he emphasized, was in line with the core beliefs Coleman had developed in his own coaching philosophy.

“In Coach Norvell’s first CLIMB speech with the coaching staff, the blueprint was laid out,” Coleman said. “And you understood right then how much work it was going to take. But you had this feeling deep down in your soul that this amount of work is going to get us where we need to go.”

Much of that work would start in the weight room. Florida State’s players not only needed to get bigger, stronger and faster, but they needed to develop the work ethic and accountability that had been lacking after two coaching changes in just over two years.

It was not a situation that was unique to the Seminoles, of course. Coleman said the journey is virtually the same in every program that is trying to transition from struggles to success. And it’s precisely what he loves so much about working in strength and conditioning.

Coleman pointed out that the most iconic scenes from the classic boxing film, “Rocky,” are not in the ring, but in the training montage, as Sylvester Stallone’s character prepares for his big bout.

“That’s what I fell in love with — the fight before the fight,” Coleman said.

Florida State’s fight before the fight was not easy, of course. And the results were not immediate.

The Seminoles went 3-6 that first season, then 5-7 in 2021. It wouldn’t be until the spring of 2022, two years after Norvell and his staff arrived, that Coleman saw tangible proof that Florida State was turning the corner.

“I’m watching one day, and I’m like, ‘That was a really, really good practice,'” Coleman recalled. “And then we had another one. Then we had another one. Then you look up and we’ve got 13 of the 14 spring practices where Coach is like, ‘I’m extremely pleased with this.'”

Sure enough, FSU finally broke through that fall. The Seminoles went 10-3 in 2022, and they followed that up with 13 wins and an ACC championship in 2023.

While Coleman and Florida State’s other strength coaches do most of their work behind the scenes and spend their Saturdays cheering the players and supporting the on-field coaches, Coleman said the Seminoles’ success is no less gratifying.

“I’ve always been an in-the-shadows guy,” he said. “I don’t have to be out front where you’ve got to see my face, you’ve got to hear my voice. … Even though I may be large on the sideline, that’s not my thing. I want you to see the players’ passion. If you see the players’ passion, then you see what the strength staff has done. You can see that we’ve lit a fire within them.”

That fire was obvious throughout the last two seasons, and Florida State’s strength coaches believe it will rage just as strong — if not stronger — when preseason camp opens this Wednesday.

The lessons Coleman and company taught in those early years are now ingrained throughout the program. Older players now reinforce them to younger players. Teammates constantly hold each other accountable.

It should be no surprise, then, that this current Florida State team has turned in the fastest times and greatest strength numbers of any in Norvell’s tenure.

“The 2023 [ACC] championship, as incredible as it was and as fun as it was, it’s not the end for anybody that was involved in it,” Coleman said.

With nearly 15 years in the business, Coleman can point to a number of ways he has improved as a strength coach.

He has learned more of the science behind the craft and acquired much greater technical expertise. He also is constantly fine-tuning his people skills to make sure he can relate to players from all different backgrounds.

“I love learning what drives them and what motivates them,” Coleman said. “Being able to coach Alex Mastromanno and also being able to coach Josh Farmer. They’re from completely different places, but they’ve got to do the same thing.”

The stakes are much higher today than when Coleman took that first internship back at his alma mater. And he’d probably no longer be content to make just, “200 bucks.”

But he insists the passion for the job has never changed.

Just like he knew this was the profession for him when he was organizing protein shakes back in Lafayette, La., he said he cherishes every aspect of serving on Florida State’s strength and conditioning staff. Especially when he reflects on how far the Seminoles have come in these last few years.

“To this day, I have the same feeling,” Coleman said. “I just love what I get to do. And who I do it with.”

Next in our series: Director of Football Strength & Conditioning Josh Storms

Previous Installments:

* Strength coach Darrion Jones supports Seminoles ‘from highest of highs to lowest of lows’

* ‘The weight room is my ministry’ … Nick Dowdy finds calling with FSU strength program

* From trenches to training, Tom Farniok helps FSU football strength staff stay on cutting edge

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Talk about this story with other die-hard Florida State football fans on the Tribal Council.