The Basketball Podcast: EP357 with Angelo Gingerelli on Compete, Thrive and Win

In this week’s basketball coaching conversation, Seton Hall Strength & Conditioning Coordinator Angelo Gingerelli joins The Basketball Podcast to discuss how to compete, thrive and win in College athletics.

Gingerelli is the author of The Next Four Years: Compete, Win & Thrive in College Athletics that provides a comprehensive look at the transition from high school to college athletics, offering student-athletes an essential blueprint to compete, win and thrive at the next level. Over the years he has helped thousands of student-athletes compete at the highest level of Division 1 athletics.

As the Strength & Conditioning Coach at Seton Hall University since 2005 he regularly works with hundreds of men & women each year from a variety of sports and has been a key factor in the Pirates’ success in the extremely competitive Big East Conference. He has held similar positions at Virginia Tech, North Carolina State and the Pittsburgh Pirates as well as training numerous elite high school athletes each year.

In addition to his duties in the weight room, Gingerelli is an adjunct professor (SHU’s 2024 Adjunct Professor of the Year), winner of Seton Hall’s prestigious Most Valuable Pirate Award (2011), published author, frequent podcast guest, state/regional conference presenter and has served as the New Jersey State Director of the National Strength & Conditioning Association (NSCA).

Gingerelli also co-authored with Richard Boergers the book, Finish Strong: Resistance Training for Endurance Athletes.

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Angelo Gingerelli Quotes:

“We’re trying to get these kids ready for college level academics, living away from home for possibly the first time . . and just a completely different lifestyle. I always say college is a great time in your life, but it’s also can be a really hard time.”

“When they’re recruiting kids to campus, they’re showing you the best stuff that the school has to offer . . but there’s some work attached to those rewards that doesn’t always get pitched on the recruiting trip.”

“The best piece of advice I can give anybody is contact the strength and conditioning coach ASAP. Get in touch with him or her. Find out what is expected of you when you get there. So, at the very least, you know what you’re up against and how you can get a game plan to succeed when you get there. Because in sport like basketball, the weight room is really the first thing you do when that fall semester starts. Practice is still maybe a couple of weeks away.”

“In the basketball world, training in the weight room isn’t a part of the culture of the game the way it is in some other sports. And then you look at the year-round culture of youth basketball, there’s not really a lot of time to train any given point of the year.”

“We’re constantly selling young men and young women and their parents or their coaches, ‘This is the highest level. We’ve got to train like LeBron and Kevin Durant.’  When you’re in high school, if your training age is zero, you really need to be building the foundation of the house. Get really good at your squats, really good at your jumps and landings, really good at your running mechanics. And then once you master all that, then go and train like an NBA or WNBA player.”

“I think is the smartest thing you can do if you’re a college athlete is to get to know your schedule as best as you possibly can and realize how you can succeed within that framework.”

“Listen to your coaches, keep working on your game, learn the playbook inside out, know where you’ve got to be at the right time.  And then, really lean into taking care of your body because that’s the one thing you really have control as a college athlete. If the coach decides not to put you in on this defensive set . . you really can’t control that. But what you can absolutely control is being in great shape, . . being able to jump as high as you can, run as fast as you can for as long as you can, and be strong enough that if you get the nod to go in the game, you don’t get pushed around and bullied by your counterpart on the other team . . most basketball kids we meet as freshmen in college can really make leaps and bounds of gains in those first couple years of college.”

“If we don’t train in season and our in season is a minimum of four months out of the year, that’s a third of the year that your body’s not getting better. And really, physiologically, it’s getting worse because you’re depleting it, you’re being dehydrated, you’re beating it up day after day after day. We’re doing [strength and conditioning] to build it back up.”

“In the performance world, we’ve got to do a little bit of a job of selling recovery. The gym is important, the squat rack’s important, but the pool and the cold tub and the sauna and the foam rolling and the nutrition and the hydration, all that is probably just as important. It’s not as cool to watch people do that on Instagram or TikTok, but it’s definitely as important.”

Angelo Gingerelli Breakdown: