This is one loss football coaches Mike Locksley and Pete Shinnick have embraced.
Since the end of last season, Maryland’s Locksley and Towson’s Shinnick have shed 90 and 50 pounds, respectively. The 6-foot-3 Locksley, a former safety with the Tigers, now weighs 250 pounds, while the 6-4 Shinnick, a former guard at Colorado, tips the scales at 227 pounds.
For various reasons, Locksley and Shinnick undertook the effort to get into better shape. The shared objective is practicing what they preach while extending their lives to continue coaching the sport they love.
“One of the things I’ve talked a lot about with this team is sacrifice. What are you willing to give up?” Locksley said. “And for me, I’m willing to give up being fat and not working out and not taking care of myself because I’ve got to have the energy level to motivate them for 12 games. It’s hard to do that when you’re not in shape.”
Added Shinnick: “I wanted to feel better, and the results have been great. I want to live a long time, and I want to coach a long time, and I want to have the energy and life to do it.”
Here is how the coaches have changed the way they view nutrition and exercise.
‘Instead of gushers, I eat grapes’
Last October, Locksley weighed 340 pounds. Stress eating — usually late at night — and a slow recovery from replacement surgery on both knees complicated his ability to keep his weight down.
“I wasn’t in great shape,” Locksley, 54, said. “So I finally decided, ‘Hey, I’m going to get the weight off.’ And I knew I had to get back into the quarterbacks room to coach [this season].”
Under the direction of team physician Dr. Yvette L. Rooks, Locksley was prescribed Mounjaro, a weight-loss medication that mimics the feeling of fullness after a person eats a meal. He also eliminated sugars, bread and large meals and drastically reduced his consumption of alcohol.
Locksley said he doesn’t really miss anything.
“I don’t really have any desire,” he said. “I’ve had some sweets, but I had one or two bites, and then I’m like, ‘Blech, I don’t want it.’”
A nutritional plan for Locksley might involve two eggs and a protein or oatmeal for breakfast, chicken breast and salad for lunch, and a protein and vegetable for dinner. He has replaced Red Bull energy drinks with small cups of espresso and candy with fruit as afternoon snacks. “Instead of gushers, I eat grapes,” he quipped.
Locksley said he walks four to five days weekly with a daily goal of 12,000 steps. He said he has gone from size 50 to 42 in pants and 4XL to 2XL in T-shirts and sweatshirts. He joked that his “Locksley Pop-up Shop” of clothes is popular among the team’s defensive and offensive linemen.
Locksley said the weight loss has revived him.
“I feel refreshed, more energized with better sleep at night,” he said. “I don’t wake up from sleep like I was in a car accident. My knees, my back, all of those things that used to ache, I feel stronger.”
Locksley, who weighed about 210 pounds when he was a safety at Towson, said his objective is to reach 225 pounds. He underwent hernia surgery in the offseason and was recently cleared to resume weight training, which he wants to undertake three or four days a week.
Senior defensive end Taizse Johnson said he hopes Locksley will share his plan with him after his playing career ends. He said he and his teammates are proud of their coach.
“You can’t help but feel good for a guy losing weight,” he said. “He could have just been content with how he was looking, but the hard work we’ve seen him doing resonates throughout the whole team. We’re like, ‘Oh wow, Coach Locks is taking a step forward in his own daily life. So let’s see what else we can do better.’”
‘Feel 10 years younger’
Like Locksley, Shinnick experienced his epiphany during the season when he was exhausted during Towson’s 11-game schedule. That dovetailed with his wife Traci’s research into cooking and eating clean and a question posed by his 48-year-old brother Chris during what Shinnick called “a really big meal” at Cracker Barrel between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
“He asked me, ‘What does getting in shape look like for the rest of your life?’” Shinnick, 59, said. “I was like, ‘Man, that’s a great question.’ So I was sitting there, going, ‘All right, it’s New Year’s, and I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to change something because I want to feel better.’”
Shinnick, who weighed between 250 and 275 pounds as a guard at Colorado, and his wife replaced chips, cookies and ice cream with fruits and vegetables. Traci Shinnick boils whole chickens to remove the meat for low-calorie quesadillas and salads and uses bone broth for stews and soups. The couple also eats two meals per day.
A typical day for Shinnick involves a breakfast of an egg on a slice of sourdough bread and a lunch or dinner of white chili, tortilla chips and a peach, and a dessert of watermelon, cherries or grapefruit.
In the first 3 1/2 months, Shinnick said he lost 30 pounds. His waist size dropped from 42 to 38, and his shirt size shifted from 3XL to 2XL. He even lost weight during a vacation to Italy in June.
“There was a gelato shop every 10 feet in Italy, and we got ice cream, but we walked a lot,” he said. “And when we got back, I lost three pounds just because we had walked so much.”
In the offseason, Shinnick said he walked or used an elliptical four to five times per week. That frequency dropped to three times per week during preseason camp, but he said his hip and knee problems have since disappeared, and he is enjoying the best sleep he’s had in years.
“I really feel 10 years younger from the standpoint of waking up and getting ready to go and doing all of that,” he said, adding that he is aiming to get to 219. “I feel unbelievably better, and my focus, energy, life, attention to detail, that’s been the biggest thing.”
Tigers defensive coordinator Darian Dulin teases Shinnick that he “lost a whole coach. Where did the other guy go?” But Dulin acknowledged that he has been motivated by Shinnick’s weight loss to change his habits.
“We follow the leader,” he said. “You see coaches running and getting up in the weight room all the time now. We’ve got to keep up with the head guy.”
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