Pi neer News
W H E R E S P O RT S S E T U S A PA RT
Lew Porchiazzo ’09: Olympic Training Center Internship Leads to Big Ten Position at University of Michigan
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our years ago, Lew Porchiazzo ’09 was spending the dog days of summer on the turf of Wightman Stadium, working hard to physically ready himself for his final year as a member of the William Paterson football team. These days, he finds himself in a very different role, as he now strives to prepare the
University of Michigan’s student-athletes for their upcoming seasons. This marks Porchiazzo’s fourth year as a member of the Wolverine strength and conditioning staff, designing and implementing programs for UM’s field hockey, softball, women’s gymnastics, and women’s rowing teams. He has worked with seven
Lew Porchiazzo ’09 during his years on the Pioneer Football Team
Volume 13, Number 2
Fall 2012
teams that won Big Ten Conference titles, including at least one championship for each of the programs, something that has motivated the former Pioneer to strive for continued improvement as a coach. “It’s great to be a part of and to have some small contribution to the studentathletes’ successes,” says the Colonia native. “The training program is a yearround plan. It’s challenging, as each sport is different, so I continue to research and learn about each sport’s physical demands in order to create a program that will maximize effects.” Porchiazzo learned the value of sport-specific research as a William Paterson undergraduate when he landed an internship at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado during the 2009 spring semester. While there, he assisted the three fulltime strength and conditioning coaches with an eclectic mix of resident athletes in sports such as freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling, modern pentathlon, judo, and various shooting events,
supervising training sessions and tracking results. “I really educated myself about those sports and the respective training programs, but also about the training process in general,” Porchiazzo says. “I didn’t know much when I started, but going out to Colorado Springs was one of the best things I could have done.” Upon completing his bachelor’s degree in exercise science at William Paterson in May 2009, Porchiazzo spent the next few months in Waco, Texas, as an intern at Baylor University, working primarily with the football team. When two former mentors moved from the Olympic Training Center to Ann Arbor in the summer of 2009, Porchiazzo joined them at Michigan. Starting as a graduate assistant, he pursued a master’s in exercise physiology at nearby Eastern Michigan University while working at University of Michigan, and he was later promoted to assistant strength and conditioning coach for Olympic sports in December 2011. “It was a bit of a trial by fire at first, but I received a
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