UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Kristina Jeffries sat in her office off of the gym in Pegula Ice Arena.
Despite being in the basement of the rink, there is nothing dark or dreary about the space. The gym is state of the art, with big windows that overlook the corridor, giving the illusion of an airy environment. The office is bright, with high ceilings and light-colored walls.
Eight years after she arrived in Happy Valley, the Ohio native is the sole performance enhancement coach for the Penn State ice hockey teams, and the newest addition to the Penn State men's hockey staff.
"Speaking to other coaches… they just absolutely rave about her," head coach Guy Gadowsky said. "Coach Jeff Cook from soccer said, 'She's just the absolute best,' and that his guys just absolutely love KJ. And then, Jeff Kampersal is someone I have great respect for. He is the most intelligent coach I think I've been around in so many ways, and his standards are really, really high – and this is the first time I've heard him talk about someone that he just has to have.
"He just feels (KJ) is so important to what his program does and the culture of his program… he does a great job with his atmosphere and his culture. It's not just the experiences that our guys have had with her, it's also the recommendations from coaches that I really respect about her job."
When Jeffries joined the program earlier this year in a short-term role after former performance enhancement coach Cameron Davidson departed, it quickly became clear that she wasn't just going to be a temporary replacement.
"After about two, three weeks, Gads came up to us and we're like, 'I don't know why you're looking anywhere else, KJ is doing an awesome job,'" Captain Paul DeNaples said. "She's just so high-spirited, she's got the energy – she's got more energy than us in there. She really cares about us."
To Jeffries, the best part of her job is building relationships with the student-athletes that she works with. But, almost as important, and what she describes in her own words as "selfish," is getting to be a woman that paves the way for others to become strength and conditioning coaches.
"When I first got into this, I only knew of women's basketball and now they're so many more options," Jeffries said. "There's women in the NFL, there's women that coach baseball, there's women in men's ice hockey. It's extremely rewarding, and it also makes me feel like if you're one of the first, you gotta be pretty darn good at it … that just kind of fuels my fire a little bit more because I want to be successful so that other women have the same opportunities, and I think that's what it comes down to."
Jeffries first became interested in performance enhancement in high school. She initially wanted to be an athletic trainer, as her high school had an athletic training program that she was involved in.
"I had a strength coach in high school and back then it was few and far between to find a high school strength coach," Jeffries recalled. "I absolutely loved it, everything about him making workouts for us. I got to lift with our football team most of the time – I was also on the track team as a thrower, so lifting was just kind of what I did. And then when I went to college I followed the athletic training route, because I thought that's kind of what I wanted to do. When I got there, I realized, 'Nah, this isn't for me.'"
So Jeffries switched her degree path to strength and conditioning, and graduated from The University of Findlay with a Bachelor's of Science in Strength and Conditioning and an Associate in Personal Training.
"After I graduated with my undergraduate degree, I didn't know really any other female strength coaches," Jeffries said. "I certainly did not know any personally, but I knew of a couple down at the University of Tennessee, I followed their women's basketball program pretty closely when I was growing up…so, I thought in my mind, 'That's who's represented. So, I'm going to go be a women's basketball strength coach.'"
After sending out her resume to a handful of different schools, Tennessee State University offered to have Jeffries as an intern. The following year, the then-assistant director of strength and conditioning, Chuck Losey, asked Jeffries to stay on as a graduate assistant. Losey is now the assistant athletic director of performance enhancement for football at Penn State.
"I was at Tennessee State for three years… the spring semester of my last year at Tennessee State was actually when James Franklin took the Vanderbilt job, and that staff turned over…Chuck applied for and got the assistant strength and conditioning position at Vanderbilt," Jeffries said.
Jeffries then followed Losey to Vanderbilt, where she worked with women's soccer, women's tennis, men's golf and women's golf. After working with the program for just over three years, Franklin and his staff, including Losey, came up to Penn State. Jeffries then made the decision to join the Nittany Lions, and started working with women's hockey, women's lacrosse, women's rugby, men's soccer, and track & field.
"It's great that I've worked for the past eight years with hockey, so I'm familiar with the sport for sure," Jeffries said. "Before I was working with a lot of different sports, and I've never been able to just focus on one before. That's been probably the biggest perk, is being available to the guys the whole time…I'm always here. So, we can treat them like this is more of a professional environment. If they need warm-up before practice, extra work after practice, different forms of evaluation – we have technology that can help us do that, and we can make sure that we're giving them the right prescription for making them better on the ice every weekend."
Jeffries' day starts at 7:30 a.m., when her first men's hockey lift group comes in before she works with women's hockey athletes around noon. Additional men's hockey athletes come into the gym at 1 p.m. for a second lift group, and then the gym is open for players to use after practice.
The team does an assortment of different workouts designed by Jeffries on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to improve on-ice performance and assist with injury prevention. Jeffries also plans certain programs for individual athletes to help them become more explosive or speedy on the ice.
Leading up to a game weekend, the team will taper down workouts after Wednesday in order to get their bodies ready for the matchup and allow for much needed rest and recovery.
"We use Teambuildr as our app so I like our ability to go in and change (the program) depending on the outcome of a game or who we're playing the next game, so it's not like a set in stone program," Jeffries said. "If we go into overtime on Saturday night and they're exhausted on Monday, I can go in and change a couple things and make sure that they feel better leaving than when they came in."
To the men's team and coaching staff, it doesn't matter that Jeffries is a woman. While Jeffries has been told in the past not to apply to men's teams, she hasn't let it stop her from achieving her goals.
"I think you always get pigeonholed – and I've done it to myself too, especially starting out. When I first started, I thought the pinnacle would be to work women's basketball, and now it's not going to happen," Jeffries said with a laugh.
And to Gadowsky, all that matters is that his program is filled with competent, ambitious individuals who are dedicated to helping men's hockey succeed.
"When you interact with her, you're interacting with an extremely positive, educated, very passionate strength coach," Gadowsky said. "I've never thought 'Oh, she's a female strength coach.' And I don't think our players have ever looked at it that way either… when you have those values, I don't think whether you're a man or woman plays a part."
Some of the words that players continually repeated when describing Jeffries' impact on the program were "unbelievable," and "phenomenal." But regardless of how they described Jeffries, they all emphasized how she was indispensable to the team.
"Energy. She is all energy," Jimmy Dowd said. "She's unbelievable with us. I'm a huge fan of the lifts she does, she's always firing us up in the gym, her attention to detail is incredible. She's always doing extra stuff, like analyzing our heart rates, making spreadsheets for us… she really goes over the top and she's unbelievable at what she does."
