Born and raised in Los Angeles, Strength and Conditioning Coordinator Andre Woodert attended Agoura High School and played football, basketball and track. Following his passion to play football, Woodert applied to colleges with intense academics and quality sport teams.
Woodert graduated with a 4.3 GPA, earned top letters of recommendation and excellence on the field. He attended the University of Southern California and played football all four years under Head Coach Pete Carroll and with teammates such as Troy Polamalu, Carson Palmer and Reggie Bush.
“I chose a school with a great academic and football program,” said Woodert. “I worked hard during high school and received an academic scholarship.”
Woodert majored in kinesiology, the study of body mechanics. He got a job as Sports Performance Director at Stack Velocity Sports Performance and worked with young and professional athletes.
In 2013 Woodert was introduced to Loyola High School by some of his clients.
“Rubin Peters ’14 and a bunch of other guys came in and mentioned Loyola. Then, it was Coach Sanders,” Woodert said. “They needed an interim trainer for speed work for the football team.”
Two years later, Woodert secured the job as strength and conditioning coach for football and a PE teacher. Woodert also teaches health and weight-lifting and oversees the fitness of all Loyola athletes.
“Loyola invests in the success of the people they hire,” said Woodert. “It’s a welcoming environment. Everyone is easy to work with.”
Woodert pushes himself as a coach and pushes athletes to perform to their best ability. “Be ready in season and out of season” is a phrase he implements in training.
Loyola won five CIF championships and two Commissioner’s Cups in the past two years, a testament to Woodert’s successful training efforts among many achievements.
Every morning, Woodert wakes up at 5 a.m. He arrives at Loyola around 6 a.m. and oversees many team workouts in the mornings.
Woodert plans his workouts based on the “Specificity Principle.” Training athletes based on their specific sports, he designs workouts to force athletes to elicit particular performance responses from the body.
“Offseason is mostly about general strength and conditioning,” Woodert said. “Preseason, we start to produce more specificity and try to get ready for a game, try to train at an intensity level higher than competition so competition becomes easier. As the season wears on, you switch to maintenance mode: maintain the gain you made in the offseason and preseason.”
Woodert teaches weight training and health. Like Loyola sport workouts, weight training focuses on programing. Students research about their goal, create a baseline test, go through their plan, retest at the end and reprogram.
Motivating students during workouts or before competition, Woodert speaks to different sports teams in different manners.
Woodert said, “We have a big pump up speech for the football team, and that speech may be different than what the water polo team or swim team would hear.”
Woodert coaches Loyola athletics because he wants his athletes to perform to their fullest.
“It’s cool to see what the human body can do and how far you can get it to progress,” Woodert said. “That’s why I wake up. That’s why I play basketball in my free periods, so I can challenge my students when they get better and keep pushing forward so they can be great one day.”
Woodert leads workouts everyday based on his philosophy that he cannot expect students to perform workouts he himself cannot do.
Woodert said, “I’m a firm believer in practice what you preach. I won’t, as a coach, make anybody do something I would not do or have not done. I work hard to maintain that level of fitness because it puts more authority behind ‘this is the task and this is how hard I expect you to do it.’”
