'Any chance to get an edge': Inside Rutgers football's offseason in the weight room

PISCATAWAY – Before Jay Butler ended up at Rutgers as football’s strength and conditioning coach, the Bucknell grad began his career as a graduate assistant in the strength and conditioning department at East Carolina University.

The year was 1992. He was 22.

He well remembers the first day he walked into the weight room where the women’s track and field athletes were working out.

“I saw her across the crowded weight room,” Butler said recently, relaxing in a chair behind his office desk in the 15,500-square-foot facility at the Hale Center.

Who he saw was the girl he would eventually marry. Her name was Jo Ann Thornton, 20, from Delaware. Butler, who grew up in Hillsborough, couldn’t help but see that she and a teammate were not paying attention to a particular workout.

“I was getting angry,” he said with a smile. “I actually yelled at her that first day.”

They have four daughters now: Kylie, 21; Casey, 20; Sydney, 19; and Katherine, 16. Two attend the University of Florida, the other Florida State. The youngest will be a junior in high school. Plus, there’s the female cat and the female dog.

Florida State and Florida? That’s what you call a house divided.

And in more ways than one.

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Since Butler returned to Rutgers in 2020, reunited with football coach Greg Schiano, he has lived with his parents in the house he grew up in, while his wife and daughters remain in Florida. The family had moved there when Butler followed Schiano when he took the job with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Butler, now RU’s director of sports performance, originally joined his staff in 2001.

“It’s not ideal,” Butler said about being 1,100 miles from his family. “It was a tough decision. Kylie was going to be a senior and we were planning to move back to New Jersey after she graduated (2021). But COVID messed things up. Everyone was a senior after that, and the last one is a junior, so no one wants to leave.”

He gets away for a couple of weeks after the season, occasional weekends in February when recruiting is over, and during spring break. His longest break is three weeks in May. And of course, there is FaceTime.

With the official start of practice in late July, this is his busiest time of year.

On this late afternoon, a couple of players were testing weight machines, while another was snatching passes spinning from an unrelenting machine.

“If you don’t love football, or your teammates, this is a real hard place to be. There is no hiding,” Butler said. “Trust me.”

During summer months, it is not unusual to see players working out from morning to late afternoon. Besides a plethora of various weight machines, there is also a 60-yard FieldTurf track.

“Sports science stuff has evolved a little bit since the last time,” Butler said about the advances in technology. “Whether from a performance standpoint or recovery standpoint, we use metrics to try to mimic practices or games. We’re able to measure a lot of different things you didn’t have before from a performance standpoint.

“In the old days you had very few absolute measurements to measure performance or progress. You had speed times, strength numbers and jump measurements. Now,” he added, “you have catapult sets that measure miles-per-hour and how fast you accelerate, change direction. It’s basically a velocity-based system that measures how fast you are moving on a typical strength exercise, like benching or squats. It’s a program for speed and intensity and reps. You can tell kids to move things fast, but now you can actually measure.

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“Now, you have a GPS system, force plates, recovery data, and a velocity based lifting system that allows you to track the speed of the bar in many of your strength exercises. Everything we have allows us the ability to program in a way we never have before and to monitor their progress like never before. It adds to their intensity in everything they do because it gives them immediate feedback.”

“There’s significant changes as to what they have at their disposal,” he said about the program. “Nutritionist, recovery (index) training room, salt tanks, saunas and sleep chambers. Any chance to get an edge,” he said.

Butler has four assistants, with expertise in sports science and analytics.

“It’s just not helping with how much weight they are lifting or how fast they are running. Are they really progressing as an athlete? That’s what I’m all about,” Butler said. “Are we moving the needle positively? How do you apply your strength, are you more powerful? Can you accelerate better?”

Butler, whose father Fred was an assistant football coach at Hillsborough (‘69-71) before being head coach at Metuchen (‘72-75), knows all about conditioning. After playing at Hillsborough, he went on to become a two-time All-American tackle (6-7, 300) at Bucknell. He was a freshman when Schiano was a senior captain there. He then signed with the Giants as a free agent and would play one year in the NFL.

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“My dedication gave me a chance to play in the NFL,” he said. “When I started coaching, I had that same mentality that I could do the same thing for these kids. I try and instill that same level of I discipline or accountability.’’

He took those attributes to East Carolina, then to Dartmouth for five years, and eventually to Rutgers.

“Coach Schiano calls the weight room the incubator of the culture. We drive them to be sacrificial. What are you willing to do outside of here? Are you willing to go to bed, willing to eat the right things, willing to hydrate? That’s a huge sacrifice,” Butler said.

For Butler, it is a job he loves.

Almost as much as being a father to four girls.

After leaving the NFL he hooked on with IMG Academy in Bradenton. The family remained in Tampa, about 50 miles north of IMG.

While his wife held down a job as an account manager in the medical device industry, Butler became a stay-at-home dad.

“I would drop them off at school, then go play golf,” he said, breaking into a laugh. “But I would grocery shop, I could clean, I could cook, I could do all that needed to be done around the house; the yard work. I would pick them up from school and take the girls wherever. Just to have four healthy kids is a blessing. Of course, girls cry a lot. But for 2 ½ years, I loved it.”

He has also loved his career. After all, it gave him his family.

This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: 'Any chance to get an edge': Inside Rutgers football's offseason in the weight room