“He’s got that dog in him” is the highest compliment an athlete can receive, an ode to their mental and physical strength. Every program tries to breed that dog into the players in the offseason weight room. But Sam Houston has an actual dog in its weight room, a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Kody Jo, watching to ensure they don’t skip any reps.

Trevor Williams, the Associate Athletic Director of Strength and Conditioning, started bringing Kody Jo to work with him three days after he and his wife got her. Kody Jo has made Sam Houston’s weight room her home over the past seven years, getting boops, pets and treats from over 450 athletes participating in 17 different sports. She’s waiting by the back door every morning, excited to go to work.

Sam Houston’s football players entered the weight room with the same eagerness this offseason. After posting a 3-9 record with just 88 rushing yards per game in its first FBS season, head coach KC Keeler knew his team needed to get bigger and stronger to achieve a winning record. So he, Williams and Sam Houston general manager Clayton Barnes devised a plan to push spring football practice back to the latest it's ever been so the Bearkats could get eight straight weeks in the weight room.

Williams oversaw the football program for the first few weeks while Keeler hired new football strength and conditioning coach Kevin Schadt from UTEP. Amid an 0-8 start in 2023, Keeler said the 37-34 loss to UTEP was the one which required the most soul searching. 

“The only team we felt was more physical than we were was UTEP,” Keeler said in the spring.

Both Schadt and Williams were students in the Delaware program when Keeler served as head coach. Williams was a walk-on football player and Schadt was a strength and conditioning intern. In Schadt’s freshman season, he grabbed coaches coffee and towels for players as Delaware made it to the FCS National Championship behind the arm of Joe Flacco and the legs of running back Omar Cuff.

“When I started to see how much of an effect it could have on the athletes and how much it could help them achieve their goals, that became a huge passion of mine,” Schadt said. 

Keeler said he knew his program’s culture was intact by how the players attacked the weight room during the winless start, as evidenced by the 3-1 finish to the year. But the Bearkats built their bodies into an FBS mold over that two-month span before spring football practice. 

At the forefront of the change was the quarterback room of Hunter Watson, Jase Bauer, Grant Gunnell and Sylas Gomez, whom the coaching staff referred to as the strongest group of quarterbacks they’d had.

“Quarterbacks are the natural leaders,” Schadt said. “When you get your leaders to be the guys up front working the hardest, you have no choice but to pick up your game.”

Sam Houston redid its football turf after spring practice to reach a level playing field with other schools in Conference USA. But the much-needed renovations left them without a stadium for summer strength and conditioning. 

But Schadt pivoted, taking the Sam Houston players to the intramural flag football fields. He then had the field spray painted with yard markers so there’d be no confusion about where drills began and how far players had to run. 

“Any question about, ‘Hey, how is this transition going to go?’ Man, he put those to bed very early,” Williams said.

Before Sam Houston came back from a 22-0 deficit in NRG Stadium to defeat heavily favored Texas State, they were spray painting an IM field so they could work out. 

“You meet adversity, and you come to the table with solutions,” Williams said.

That attitude is how Sam Houston has started 4-1 in its second FBS season.