Basketball strength coach Brendon Ziegler has taken NU to the next level

In the last six games, Northwestern has had three of its guards play 35 or more minutes on average: Boo Buie, Brooks Barnhizer and Ryan Langborg.

All three rank in the Top 8 in minutes per game in the Big Ten, with Barnhizer tied for first and Buie just behind him in third.

Head coach Chris Collins is prepared for, and unfazed by the heavy workload he's given to his best and most experienced players.

"Good players want to play," he said after the Wildcats beat Illinois, 96-91, in overtime, on a night when Buie, Barnhizer and Langborg all played 40-plus minutes. "Good players are wired to play a lot of minutes. That's why you train, that's why you have strength and conditioning."

Collins has always given rein to his best players to play, but something's been different recently. Four of his seven highest minutes-per/game players in his career have come in the last two seasons, two of his best as coach at Northwestern.

What's made such a trend possible?

Enter Brendon Ziegler, the beloved strength coach universally referred to as BZ.

Collins brought Ziegler into the program in 2022, during the offseason ahead of the team's improbable return to the NCAA Tournament last year.

"BZ came in last year and has done a phenomenal job," Collins said. "He has so much experience, his energy is infectious and the guys really believe in him...

"Growing up with the pro game, I understand the value of strength and conditioning and the training and nutrition staff. You can't be at the highest level now if you don't have those things at a really high level. Brendon has been amazing for our guys and a big reason why, knock on wood, our guys have been able to fight through heavy minutes and log heavy minutes and stay very durable.”

Collins should know. Ziegler has the head coach doing snatches, front squats and cleans to stay in shape.

"[Collins] was really familiar with the system I use because he trained with Al Vermeil," Ziegler said. "Al is my mentor, he used to be the strength and conditioning coach with the Chicago Bulls, so [Collins] had trained in high school with Al.

"They've embraced what what we've done and the one thing we have is great alignment."

Vermeil was an inaugural inductee into the USA Strength and Conditioning Coaches Hall of Fame, and is the only strength coach to have won championships in the NFL, with the 49ers, and in the NBA, with the Bulls. Ziegler's own background is in football; he played defensive line at D-III Hamline in Minnesota.

"Al took the best of weightlifting, of sprint, of track and field, injury prevention and physical therapy, and then he took basketball-specific skills, and kind of wrapped up into one comprehensive program," Ziegler said. "He kind of gave me the cheat code on how to train the guys. All I've done is not try to screw it up."

Much like Vermeil, Ziegler has crossed his knowledge over to hoops with great success, working with veteran players like Buie and Barnhizer to unlock the next levels of their game.

"Their work all offseason has set the tone for what they're doing in the season," Ziegler said. "Their leadership and ability to push through adversity, it's all been on display."

Ziegler said that, despite the disproportionate workload placed on those guys on the court, their regimen off the court remains similar to the rest of their teammates.

"Very little," he said about how their workouts deviate. "A lot of that is built in the offseason and they build their capacity by leaning into really difficult tasks."

Northwestern's ability to play their best players longer than almost anyone else stems from two things.

First, Ziegler made sure to credit the rest of the program's high-performance team: Jeff Tanaka, the associate director of training; Dr. Amin Farokhrani, the team's primary physician; Lindsay Esposito, the team's dietician; and Dr. Courtney Albertson, the director of sports psychology.

"The high-performance team is a big part of supporting what I do," Ziegler said. "We provide stress; myself and the coaches provide that physical stress.

"The rest of the team does such a good job of recovering from that stress, whether it's mental stress or physical stress, there's a balancing act on the team they do very well."

Ziegler's comments regarding Albinson and her role to restore and support the athletes brought him back to the second thing: the difficult tasks they ask players to complete.

"Dr. Albinson does such a great job of backfilling what we do," he said. "We put them through difficult things year round, we lean into that.

"Things like sets of 10 on front squats in the spring, the guys absolutely hate. But they know it makes them better and they don't shy away from it. They'll do things like 33s — on-court running is really challenging and that might cause some nightmares if you bring it up to the guys but they do a good job at knowing it's part of making their game better."

The 33 number strikes fear into the hearts of basketball players across the country. The drill requires them to run baseline to baseline and back, three times, in, you guessed it, 33 seconds.

"We've done a good job filling their plates with a lot of hard things to do," Ziegler said. "It fits within this program because we want to play hard defense. We want to do difficult things on the offensive end. It fits the nature and DNA of the program."

When you talk to the players, it's clear that Ziegler doesn't just throw down a gauntlet of hard workouts and walk away.

"BZ does an awesome job," Buie said. "Huge shout-out to him because he's the guy who's always making sure we're feeling right.

"He does a great job preparing us for games by pushing our conditioning, knowing what weights to have us do, and exercises. He always has us ready to go. We have an awesome relationship."

Buie has worked with Ziegler since he arrived in Evanston. But, on top of his existing veterans, Ziegler has had the opportunity to train Langborg for the first time as a transfer in this season.

"Well, if they're willing to buy in and put in the work, then it's a really easy, smooth transition," Ziegler said. "Credit to Ryan, he's bought in and all the guys have really done that. It makes a big difference."

Langborg, a 6-foot-4, 195-pound guard, transferred in from Princeton. He's not only playing the biggest, fastest and strongest competition of his college career, jumping from the Ivy League to the Big Ten; he's also playing the most minutes of his career while doing it.

"[Ziegler has] done a fantastic job," Langborg said. "At Princeton, we don't get to go in the summer and workout with the team; it's all on our own.

"Being able to come here in the summer and get the extra workouts in and the extra strength that I needed to compete in this league, I think it's been tremendous for me."

Ziegler said that his training regimen for the guards came from discussions with Collins.

"When I first got here, it was well-established: those guys are going to play a lot," Ziegler said about Buie and Barnhizer. "We didn't really have a lot of depth, either, so they've got to be healthy, resilient, strong, and they have to be in shape to handle the minutes on court.

"So, absolutely, that was discussed, and after the first year, there was an assumption on the second year that it'd be the same with those guys."

Ziegler credits Buie and Barnhizer for setting the tone. No matter the process he outlines or form he recommends, it's on the players to execute, and he says they do an exceptional job.

"[They're] great," Ziegler said with palpable enthusiasm. "Day One, I walked in [and had] immediate buy-in from those guys.

"When you have a guy like Boo, especially, one of the better players in the country, and he's one of the hardest working guys on the team? Everybody else falls in line."

Ziegler has trained athletes for two decades now, with previous stops at Hawai'i, Wisconsin, the Bulls and Cal State-Bakersfield. Through all that experience and all those athletes, Buie and Barnhizer are at the top of his list.

"They're right up there with the best that I've coached," he said. "Their daily approach of consistency is a superpower for them.

"They come in everyday, they're ready to work, they fight through bumps and bruises. When we run on the football field outside and it's raining, they don't complain. They get out there and do every rep."

Buie, a wiry guard who might be generously listed at 180 pounds, is a great example of one of the challenges Ziegler faces in training all different body types.

Whether it's Buie, or someone listed 100 pounds heavier, like 7-foot center Matthew Nicholson, it's Ziegler's responsibility to find the right exercises and tools to get their bodies in playing shape.

Ziegler gets some help in this regard from the other team he trains: fencing.

"I would say they're different, but there's shades of gray," he said about crossover between the two sports. "There's different approaches with conditioning and movement patterns, but I use the philosophy that I want to make a better athlete.

"And a better athlete is the one that can apply and absorb force in a shorter period of time, and that really carries over well to a lot of different sports when you know the biomechanics of it."

Back to basketball, Ziegler says he translates workouts between body types by going back to basics.

"It changes [between players] in the way you introduce an exercise, especially a complicated exercise," he said. "Make it really simple, right off the bat. If these guys have success on Day One, they're much more likely to put forth effort on Day Two...

"You don't learn how to read by throwing a Tolstoy novel on someone's lap. You start with the alphabet, letters, stringing things together. We do the same in strength and conditioning. We start with simple, easy, digestible things they can have success with and then you build complexity."

With the Wildcats at 15-6 and 6-4 in the Big Ten, everyone is on the same page and showing no signs of slowing down.