Troy’s Richard Shaughnessy honored

TROY — More than a decade ago, Richard Shaughnessy was persuaded to take a full-time job with barely part-time pay as a strength and conditioning coach at Troy University.

Back then, in 1996, he oversaw every Troy sport, trained every Troy athlete and lived in the dorms.

Now, his office in the first floor of Movie Gallery Veterans Stadium is covered with more than 70 autographed pictures of former Trojan athletes, all thanking Shaughnessy for his help toward their success.

Last Thursday, the strength world took notice, honoring Shaughnessy with one of the highest honors he could get. Shaughnessy was named a Master Strength and Conditioning Coach by the College Strength and Conditioning Coaches association. He was presented a blue jacket with an M on it at a convention in Nashville. The CSCCa is based out of Salt Lake City, Utah.

Shaughnessy was one of 10 coaches to receive the award, bringing the total in the MSCC group to 80. There are certain specifications, most notably holding a bachelor’s degree and being a full-time college or professional strength and conditioning coach for at least 12 years — making the wait for the blue jacket a long time.

He received the award in front of around 400 peers and was presented the jacket by fellow MSCC Dave Van Halanger, who coached for a long time at Florida State and is now at Georgia. It was Van Halanger who persuaded Shaughnessy to take the job at Troy instead of a coaching job at Dothan High School.

“It’s very humbling,” Shaughnessy said. “For me, it’s something I’ve been waiting for a very long time. It’s like the Hall of Fame. You’re one of those guys now.”

Shaughnessy, who graduated from Northview in 1984, coached at the high school level at Northview and then at Early County in Blakely, Ga., form Harry Wayne Parrish, but took the job at Troy in 1996. He was hired to just coach football, but took over all sports. The weight room was in Sartain Hall below the basketball gym bleachers.

He took a pay cut to do it, becoming a restricted earnings guy making barely enough money to pay for his graduate classes. But he wanted to get his foot in the college door. Long before Shaughnessy started playing football in high school, he was more interested in strength and conditioning and running his own gym.

“It was my ambition to be at the college level, and this was it,” Shaughnessy said. “It was a bunch of incline benches and flat benches. It was a rat hole, but we got it done.”

He became the school’s first full-time strength coach in 1997. Not long after that, a 3,000-foot facility opened at Tine Davis Fieldhouse, but the program outgrew that. Now, all 17 sports and some regular students who take Shaughnessy’s weight training classes use the 10,000-square foot facility at Movie Gallery Veterans Stadium.

Troy head football coach Larry Blakeney found Shaughnessy to be high-strung, goal-oriented and determined. Shaughnessy showed assistant coaches quickly that he wasn’t just some power lifter, but he could mold athletes into successful, strong football players.

The 2008 Troy football team saw one player get drafted and seven more get invited to NFL camps.

“He’s been a very proactive guy in developing players,” Blakeney said. “From the time these guys sign until the time they go on to the NFL or whatever, the proof’s in the pudding with what he’s been able to do with the guys that will work.

“I dare say this program would not be where it is without Richard Shaughnessy.”

With Blakeney losing assistant coaches to higher-paying jobs almost yearly, he’s also had to worry about keeping his strength coach, who has helped mold current NFL players DeMarcus Ware, Osi Umenyiora, Leodis McKelvin, Gary Banks, Sherrod Martin and others. But Shaughnessy has built a foundation at Troy, having married wife Candice, an instructor at Troy, in 2006, and hasn’t been one to jump for green even though opportunities have come about.

“For me, it would have to be something really lucrative and something that I could see where I could be there for an extended time,” Shaughnessy said. “The turnover rate’s so big with head coaches that a lot of times the first person they’ll take with them or get rid of is the strength coach.”

Shaughnessy arrives to work before the sun comes up and usually leaves after it sets, working with athletes to get better and prevent injuries and learning more on the fly.

“There is a science to it in how you do it, how you eat, how you rest, how you train and how you work with trainers,” Shaughnessy said. “It’s still interesting to me, and there’s a lot of new stuff coming out all the time.”