By Jill McGahan '23 / Sports Information Intern

 
WILLIMANTIC, Conn. -- In the summer of 2019, Jeanne Rankin became Eastern Connecticut State University's new strength and conditioning coach.
 
The Oklahoma City native's decision to leave her position of six years as an assistant strength and conditioning coach at the University of Kentucky and move north was much more than a search for a new challenge or a new growth opportunity.
 
There was a story behind it.
 
"My wife [Vanessa Phillips Bosshart] had previously been in college coaching as a soccer coach," said Rankin. "She got out of it for a little bit, and actually became a nurse at the University of Kentucky Children's Hospital. After a year, she really missed coaching and did not enjoy nursing and all the pressures that came with it. I figured that my resume was good enough to get me a job wherever she decided to go. Through connections, she ended up getting an assistant job at the University of Connecticut [located eight miles north of Eastern] as a soccer coach. And after 19 months of searching for a job around here, I had about five people reach out to me about an open job at Eastern, 'hey, this job is open, 20 minutes away from where your wife works'. And so, I applied for it, interviewed, and got it."
 
It's a story that really pulls at the heartstrings. Moving to Connecticut and working at Eastern was all for her wife, and Rankin would have it no other way. Nothing could be better than having a job close to her wife.

In a recent feature on the strength & conditioning web site TEAMBUILDR, Jeanne Rankin was  among 14 female strength & conditioning coaches nationwide featured as 'making waves in this totally male dominant industry.' She was the only featured coach from Division III, with the majority coming from high-profile Division I programs (Texas, Arizona State, Michigan among them) and professional sports organizations (NY Yankees, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Denver Broncos).  
 But that's not the only touching story that Rankin had to share. She illuminated her reason for becoming a strength and conditioning coach, and the passion that followed.
 
"I was playing soccer in college [at the University of Colorado, and then at Oklahoma State] and I knew that I wanted to stay in athletics, but I didn't know what I wanted to do exactly," said Rankin. "When I was a freshman or sophomore, I wanted to be a journalism major. Then I found out that you needed a 3.75 GPA to get into journalism school, and that quickly disappeared. But then, I had a really great strength coach my sophomore year when I played at Colorado. She was really passionate about what she did, enjoyed working with us, and became a friend and mentor. In such a male dominated field, having a female as my strength coach showed me the possibility of being one. I'm a big believer in, if you can see something, then you can achieve it. I had never seen a female strength coach until then, and it gave me an idea, a picture, of something that I could do. And the weight room was always something that I really enjoyed. After she was my strength coach for a year, I decided to focus my academics on going into that field."
 
After earning her undergraduate degree in University Studies from Oklahoma State in 2006, Rankin served as a strength and conditioning volunteer – mostly with the women's soccer, softball and equestrian programs – while completing her M.S. in Health and Human Performance from Oklahoma State.
 
Upon graduating from Oklahoma State, she landed her first position as assistant strength and conditioning coach at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where she helped oversee nearly a dozen programs, including women's basketball and women's soccer, baseball and men's track & field.
 
From there, she worked for five years in strength and

conditioning at the University of Missouri-Kansas City before being named assistant strength and conditioning coach at Kentucky.
 
 Much like everyone else since last spring, Rankin found herself having to deal with COVID and all the changes, restrictions and new protocols that came with it. Compared to her first year, her job in the weight room was largely outside.
 
"There were so many changes throughout the summer," said Rankin, "What we heard one week was different the next week. But Lori and I decided that the best way to start training, especially after fall sports had been canceled, was to move everything outside for a while," noted Rankin of her discussion with director of athletics Lori Runksmeier. "We figured it would be better to play it safe in the beginning, see how everything goes, make sure there aren't any issues, and then build upon that throughout the semester, if possible. And once we decided that it was safe to move back into the weight room, we wanted to make sure we were playing it safe. Keeping a proper distance and masks on, I split the weight room up a bit differently. It was a matter of setting guidelines up, planning a program around those guidelines, and then doing the best you can with it."
 
Another change necessitated by COVID was the mandate for athletes to sign up in advance for a slot time. The time slots reserved spot at the Mansfield

Athletic Complex's turf field for the first seven weeks of the fall semester before cold weather forced the athletes inside to the weight room located on the bottom floor of the Sports Center
The signups, said Rankin, were very useful and made things much simpler. "Mostly so I would know how many weights I needed to bring down [to the turf field]," she pointed out. "I didn't want my student-employees to haul out more weights than we needed. It becomes very strenuous and unnecessary work if we bring down 25 sets of weights, and only three people show up. I also needed to set a limit on how many athletes could be out there, since I was spacing all the cones about six yards apart; that way, everyone would feel safe and not be too close to anyone else."
 
 Once inside, having time slots prevented a line of athletes waiting outside of the weight room from forming. Another bonus was that athletes were able to know when their teammates would be in the weight room. Providing an opportunity for teammates, and even friends, to work out together.
 
For Rankin and her student-workers, the most challenging thing was moving everything outside. But beyond that, the weight room successfully allowed athletes to work out and train while following the new COVID guidelines.
 
 "Once we had the plans implemented, everything went pretty smoothly, especially considering that I'm very serious about organization and planning," said Rankin, who was heavily involved in the administration aspect of her job at both of her previous stops before Eastern. "There were a few small things that had to be worked out, but really, the athletic staff, the administration, the athletes, and my student employees did a really good job of working with anything that came up on the fly. Making sure we planned out how everything was going to work really helped to keep the problems to a minimum."

 

And COVID did more than just change the way the weight room runs. Rankin also expressed her own changes regarding the way she deals with athletes.
 
"Talking to the athletes and realizing how hard it is for them this semester," said Rankin, "To do virtual learning, to get tutoring, and so forth. I was a lot more careful about jumping to any conclusions about how anyone was doing and tried to be understanding of everyone's circumstances. Previously, if someone was late to a session, I tended to get on them more about it. But now, there is so much more going on that they have to deal with, such as, 'were they able to get a ride down to the complex', or 'was this their first time being late'? COVID has taught me a really good lesson, as far as, don't assume what's going on in someone's life, and talk to the person first before you get frustrated by their actions."
 
Compared to her first year, nothing was what Rankin expected. The once bustling weight room was now much more still. That said, despite all of the challenges and uncertainty, the weight room was fully functional, and  Rankin continued to do her job like any other day.
 
Ultimately, COVID and the havoc that it has created has not dimmed her passion for the field of strength and conditioning.
 
"[COVID] made me evaluate different avenues I should take," she says. "For this has been a great shock to everyone. I'm a former soccer goalkeeper and I kind of thrive in chaos. I enjoy having a weight room full of people. So, it has been a bit tame for me having only six people in the weight room at a time. But it hasn't made me want to get out of strength and conditioning at all. It's more like, 'what can I do to fulfil my need to have a little bit of chaos and more events going on in my life?'"

  Jill McGahan is a sophomore Communication major who has a concentration in journalism and a minor in writing and is pursuing a career in journalism. A native of Dedham, MA, Jill is a member of the Eastern cross country and track & field programs. As part of her internship in the Sports Information Office this fall, Jill has also written stories about how the cross country, field hockey and women's soccer programs have been dealing with the pandemic, as well as feature stories on how Natalie Leger, Eastern's Sport Psychology Doctoral Trainee, and soccer alumnus Phil Stevens, the Superintendent of Schools in Willington, have been navigating through these difficult times, as well.