Graci Vlattas
Deadline Editor
In this corner, the one we call The Mountain here at Sewanee, we have a few new fighters in our ring! From coaches to programs, Sewanee’s athletic department has a few scales to balance. Luckily, yet unsurprisingly, the programs these new faces are building look wonderful from outside of Fowler, and the athletes of Sewanee could not be happier.
Coach Mike Linn, one of these new faces, wants to create his program from the ground up. After the furnished varsity weight room on the ground floor of Fowler, our athletic directors started looking for a person to head the strength and conditioning program. However, they didn’t have to go far because, in his words, “I found Sewanee. Sewanee didn’t find me.”
Linn started his athletic and professional career far away from Sewanee at UCLA. “I was a strength coach at UCLA for over 20 years. I went to school at UCLA. I was an athlete. I played football at UCLA. My wife, who I met when I was in college, was a gymnast. And the opportunity to coach in my alma mater was an unbelievable opportunity. So I was there for a long time, and back right after COVID, we had a situation where my wife’s family needed us out here in Tennessee, so we left college athletics, and I was living up in Cleveland, Tennessee,” Linn explained.
Then, in a twist of fate, Linn’s son, Ryker, received the job of the Assistant Coach for Women’s Volleyball at Sewanee. In June 2026, Linn and his wife traveled to Sewanee to visit the campus to celebrate their son’s achievement, where they stumbled upon the furnished weight room. Linn asked about the strength and conditioning program, and as a matter of happenstance, the Director of Athletics, John Shackelford, told Linn that they were looking for a head. Linn applied, and about two months later, debuted as our first strength and conditioning coach.
There is a lot of stuff to be done in the role, the entire program needs to be crafted from the ground up. With over 650 student athletes and 26 varsity teams on campus, there is a lot of overlap with who needs what, when and where. Team lift programs, usually conducted by the assistant or head coach of the team, focuses on the strength and mobility that athletes require for their specific sport. “Field hockey is going to do something different than Football does. Football’s going to do something different than Tennis does based off of what their needs are, injury prevention, those types of things,” said Linn.
Linn is dedicated to adhering to equity for each team over equality. He said, “The structure of it, from the start of the workout to the end of the workout, and all the phases of it and how it’s different for each sport, is based on what their needs are and stuff. That’s another way of systemizing that. So the first month has been systemizing the schedule, getting teams prioritized in terms of in-season and out of season, and making sure all the teams have exposure to me. Not just the footballs of the world, but every single team has as much exposure to me as possible. And then systemizing the training in terms of what we’re going to do for each team based on what their specific needs are.”
Linn is determined to bring every athletic team to greatness, not just the stereotypical, school-dominating teams. We are all important, regardless of gender, time or success. Linn said, “When you try to build a department out from the ground level up, the first step is to really systemize the scheduling part of it. It needs to be very structured. And the other big thing is when I went through the interview process, and I told them my vision of the way it looks is when you create a department with strength coaches.”
“Strength coaches, they run the workout, and they coach it, just like a practice. So it’s not a supervision. It’s not a, ‘Hey, we’re gonna write a workout up on a whiteboard’ thing.” This included being in or out of season. All athletic teams, whether fall, spring or all year, have scheduled times to come into the weight room for a lift with Linn. Everyone is included, even injured players.
When asked how he works with injured players, Linn responded, So, I work closely with Devin and her staff in sports medicine, and my job as a strength coach is, at the beginning of that injury, to work around it. We want to keep the athletes engaged with their teammates. I think that’s really, really important that they feel like they’re still part of the team at every opportunity. That’s in the weight room, that’s out on the field. We don’t ever want an athlete to just be like, ‘I just live in the train room for the next nine months because I have a torn ACL.’ We want that athlete, as soon as we can, to get them in the weight room.”
Linn expressed wanting to build the student-athlete experience at Sewanee. Through teaching us time management and discipline with hard 6 am lifts, pushing past obstacles like injuries, and connecting with teammates and others at every turn. Linn, in just these few weeks, has already started his goal. Coaches, in and out of season, from all across the department are happy with Linn’s performance. “Hiring a strength coach for our department has had a profound effect on our team. Coach Linn is instrumental in keeping our guys healthy and in their athletic development,” said Coach Joe Freitag, the new Head Football Coach for Sewanee. “Our team is getting expert level instruction in our new facility. I have received very positive feedback from our players.”
Linn emphasized, “It’s just the student athlete experience, right? Just to enhance your experience here at Swanee. Have you enjoyed your sport a little bit more? Because you’re a little bit more fit, you’re a little bit stronger, you know, try to do the best I can and try to reduce injuries and just teach those life lessons, you know? That’s enhancing the student athlete experience.”
We are excited to see what the future may bring with our new strength and conditioning coach, and may we all work hard to keep up with him as he surpasses the limits of Sewanee.