Brick Football Alum's 'Hulk Smash' Ball State Workout A YouTube Hit

David Feeley, the strength and conditioning coach for the Ball State University football team, takes his responsibility to the players he coaches very seriously.

“As a strength coach, you’re spending 75 percent of the year with the athletes,” said Feeley, a 1999 graduate of Brick Township High School. “It’s my job to preach (the head coach’s) vision for the program while he is on recruiting trips and out scouting teams.”

It’s also his responsibility to help players become the best they can be -- strong and conditioned in such a way that reduces their likelihood of getting injured, either in practice or on the playing field.

And while Feeley works hard, pushing players to reach their best, he also understands that there is room to make the workouts fun -- while at the same time firing up the players to push even harder.

That mix of fun and hard work is captured in a YouTube video produced by Ball State of one of Feeley’s workouts with the team. The “Ball State Football ‘Hulk Smashes’ Leg Day” video has nearly 130,000 views and has captured the attention of various media outlets, including ESPN, which flew out to Ball State to do a feature on Feeley, the team and its workouts.

“We do some creative events once a year,” Feeley said, and the segment caught the eye of ESPN staff, which sent a crew out to film a segment of camp where the team was lifting.”

“I have no idea what that is going to look like,” Feeley said by phone Thursday as Ball State prepared for its first football game of the 2015 season. The Cardinals beat Virginia Military Institute, 48-36, at Ball State’s home field in Muncie, Ind. “It could be 30 seconds long or it could be longer. I don’t know what to expect.”

One thing he is certain of, however, is that the groundwork for his 15 minutes of fame was laid 20 years ago, on the grass at Keller Memorial Stadium, and in the weightroom at his alma mater, where he was coached by Donovan Brown.

“He is one of the best role models in my life,” Feeley said of Brown, a 1974 Brick graduate and longtime assistant coach with the Green Dragons.

It was Brown who first taught Feeley power cleaning and squats -- the weightlifting moves that make up the backbone of his strength-training program at Ball State, where Feeley is in his fifth season as the director of strength and conditioning for the football program.

“I walked in to the Brick weight room and he told me ‘you’re going to do power cleaning and squats’ and I had no idea what he was talking about,” Feeley said. But over time he learned not only the moves that made him a solid football player but that allowed him to compete regionally in Olympic-style lifting for a time. His focus, however, has been on imparting what he learned from Brown -- knowledge that comes from a deep pedigree of strength training, Feeley said.

Brown, Feeley said, learned a great deal of his approach from Johnny Parker, who at the time Brown met him was the strength coach at Ole Miss.

“He went down to Ole Miss in 1983 and met with Rich Dalatri (a 1978 Brick graduate) who had just been hired,” Feeley said. While Brown was there, Dalatri introduced Brown to Parker.

“(Parker) was a legend,” Feeley said. “They called him ‘Mount Strengthmore.’ “ And not long after Brown met Parker, Parker met legendary NFL coach Bill Parcells, setting in motion a partnership that has been widely credited as having a significant role in the Giants’ Super Bowl championship because Parker’s program reduced injury rates among the players.

And while Brown shared the strength training knowledge he learned from Dalatri -- who is now the strength and conditioning coach for the Rutgers University women’s basketball team -- he also drove home to Feeley and dozens of other Brick Dragons football players a bigger message: one of working together as a team.

“If you’re not working with each other and for each other, it doesn’t work,” said Feeley, who received his bachelor’s degree from Plymouth State in physical education and a master’s degree from UNLV. It’s a message Feeley works to instill in his players -- both those on the football team, and those on the women’s basketball team, whom he also trains -- as well.

“We work them just as hard as we work the football players,” Feeley said of the basketball team. And with all of them, the players who get the most out of it are the one who want to improve.

“They know what we are trying to do in the weight room,” he said. And the players know that the bottom line is simple: “Teamwork is everything.”

That was a message drummed into him time and again by Brown, who -- like so many -- learned that message from legendary football coach Warren Wolf.

“He taught me to be a good worker, and to be a disciplined person,” Feeley said of Brown. “I wouldn’t be where I am without everything he did for me. I would be on a different path.”

Feeley said that while he doesn’t get back to Brick Township often -- “maybe once or twice a year,” he said -- it is still home.

“I’ve lived six different places all around the country and nothing compares to Brick,” Feeley said. “I can’t tell you how fortunate I am to have grown up in Brick. There’s nothing like it.”

College Gameday airs from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday on ESPN.