First published in the Noblesville Times.
By Kelsey Ogle
Tuesday, October 19, 2010 9:04 PM
Brian Clarke isn't your average gym teacher.
Instead of playing kickball and soccer, his students are stretching their boundaries, mentally and physically. Coach Clarke, Noblesville High School's wellness and strength coordinator, is just the man to help them do it.
Home-based from Chicago, Clarke looks quite intimidating. With biceps three times the circumference of one's head and a loud, booming voice, Clarke looks like he could pull a semi-truck down the highway, at the same speed as the other cars. But to the students here at Noblesville High School, he is simply known as the weights coach.
Clarke has only been at NHS for two years, but his program has already begun to change Noblesville athletics. Clarke has created a strength program designed for athletes who want to get stronger in ways they couldn't at practice., and he wanted to create a program like that at Warren Central, where he worked prior to coming to NHS.
"Noblesville has tremendous potential to be an academic and athletic powerhouse." said Clarke. He believed that by instituting this strength program into Noblesville would allow it to expand and develop its athletics, making it as strong as Carmel or any other competitors.
The strength program is first and foremost a weight lifting class - more specifically, athletic weights. From its inception, the program has accumulated 400 Noblesville students, making it larger than Carmel and Warren Central's weight programs. With this many students, it's hard to accommodate all of them. Even with six class periods available to split up all the enrolled students, fitting one entire class into a space as wide and as long as a mobile home is no small feat.
Earlier this year, Noblesville passed a building referendum, in which one of the items would allow the high school to expand and build a larger, more usable weight room for its expanding class size. This weight room would allow Clarke to develop the program more.
"The expansion of the weights program has been held back due to the size of our weight room. With the referendum, we could get more athletes involved, even non-athletes. I would even like to get the community involved and allow them to utilize the facility." Clarke said.
Since there are so many athletic programs that want to use the weight room for their betterment, it's sometimes impossible. Only one athletic team at a time can occupy the weight facility because it is so small. This is a disadvantage to coaches and to athletes who need the weight room to build strength and prevent injury.
"It's critical that all athletes at Noblesville enroll in the Athletic Weights program. It helps prepare them for college-level athletics and with it, coaches don't have to take vital practice time to go to the weight room." explained Clarke.
Clarke designs work-outs for specific athletics, like soccer or swimming, so that the athlete gets what he or she wants out of lifting weights. This way, when athletes go to regular practice, they can focus more on what is truly needed on the field or in the pool.
"I want to expose Noblesville to a variety of lifetime fitness." said Clarke.
Clarke's specific way of targeting what an athlete needs has earned him credibility, though he hardly needs to worry about that. Having trained Olympic qualifiers and NBA and WNBA players, Clarke is a man who knows what he is talking about.
