Gabby Foxworthy

Gabby Foxworthy trained under the pole vault gold medalist from the 2000 Olympic Games. That is an unusual line to find on a coaching resume, and a more useful one than it first sounds. Vaulting is not a strength sport in the way people assume. It is a sequencing sport: a run that has to arrive at exactly the right speed, a plant that has to happen in a window measured in fractions of a second, and a body that has to travel through a series of positions in an order it cannot improvise. Coaching that, and being coached at that level, is an education in watching movement closely enough to say which part went wrong.

That is what she brings to the training floor, which is a different job from shouting encouragement at somebody. Most sets are lost before the bar moves, in the setup, and most of what a good coach does is stop the rep that was going to go badly rather than praise the one that did not.

The strength work is the part people plan to do on their own and then quietly stop doing in week three. Having somebody who expects you on Thursday turns out to matter more than the program does.

She also runs reception, which gives her an unusual view of the place. She sees people on the first nervous phone call, then on the morning of the evaluation, then months later on the turf, still coming in. She is not a clinician and does not evaluate, diagnose or write plans of care. When something hurts rather than just feeling weak, she hands it to the clinical staff, which is a short walk in a building this size.