Rockford named Director of Athletic Performance

Montana's new Director of Athletic Performance knew he wanted to be involved in the physical well-being of collegiate student-athletes. Zach Rockford just thought it would be at a different point on the physical-readiness spectrum.

No stranger to injury as a two-sport athlete at St. Ambrose, an NAIA school in Davenport, Iowa, Rockford, who played both football and baseball for the Fighting Bees, was leaning toward physical therapy school, with the goal of helping athletes get back to competition following a setback.

A strength and conditioning internship at TCU in the summer of 2014, shortly after he graduated with a degree in human performance and fitness, changed his thinking and his career plans.

"PT is after you've been hurt. I wanted to be with the athletes before," says Rockford, who will have direct oversight of Montana's volleyball and men's basketball programs, and the track and field team's throwers, plus the Washington-Grizzly Champions Center nutrition station.

"Injury rates are through the roof in sports. I think good strength and conditioning can help lower that risk. Is it 100 percent? No, but I think we have the ability to help lower that."

Rockford went from a summer internship at TCU to two years as a graduate assistant at Incarnate Word in San Antonio to a summer internship at Texas-San Antonio to another internship at Arizona in 2016.

That experience led to his first full-time job in the profession. He was the Director of Athletic Performance at Southern Illinois-Edwardsville from the winter of 2017 until his hire by Montana this summer.

He became a Grizzly one summer after he and three others took a weeklong driving vacation of Montana. They flew to Bozeman and went to Helena, East Glacier, Glacier, Whitefish, Kalispell, Missoula and back to Bozeman before flying home.

He left the state with one thought: If something ever opened up, I'm putting my name in. That opportunity arose when Brandon Ronan stepped down last spring.

"Sure enough, at the end of April, the job was posted with the option to bring in the assistant director. You can come in and create some positive change quickly with resources and the help of the administration. I got that feeling when I went through the interview process," he said.

He also found a university that has a balance between strong academics and winning athletics. "Athletics and academics within the University of Montana are high. People take this seriously, which is important to me.

"Hopefully in the four or five years the kids are here, they are successful, and hopefully we can provide them the opportunities to be successful when they are done as well."

He knows from his time as a student-athlete how important time management is. It's why he loves his new home, the Champions Center, which allows teams to cycle through at a time that's convenient for them.

It's all about efficiency and maximizing the time student-athletes get away from practice and their sport to focus on academics and whatever other interests they might hold.

"This facility allows us to do virtually anything we need to do with the student-athletes to prepare them for their sport and to keep them healthy," he said.

"You want them to enjoy the overall college experience as well, so getting them in here in a timely fashion, then allowing them to enjoy their lives, it makes the experience so much better for them."

He went from his initial exposure to the world of strength and conditioning at TCU to designing and implementing programs at Incarnate Word to working with the football and baseball teams at Arizona.

He was able to take what he learned at those stops, taking in what they did, what he thought worked well, and start building a philosophy and putting structure to those beliefs at Southern Illinois-Edwardsville.

"There is always something you can take with you. Leveraging the last eight years, I can pull from all those different experiences," he said.

"The last five years at SIU, we started building out systems of checks and balances to help it be more operational long term. Then it's just refining some of the process and allowing new minds to dictate better success within that process, within that system."

He's a director in title but a teammate at his core. He'll work alongside Dan Ryan, the strength coach for the Griz football team. He'll add an assistant director. He'll surround himself with graduate assistants and interns.

All of it will be put in place to produce the best experience, the best results, for Montana's athletes.

"It should be a constant auditing and refining process, rather than, this is how we've done it. The goal is to create an athletic performance team that works with each other to provide the best possible training for the student-athletes," said Rockford.

"The hope is that everyone challenges each other to where we can continuously get better and then how does everything fall under the umbrella of what we want to do for the student-athlete, which is provide the best experience."

University of Montana Athletics

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