USC trusts new strength coach Trumain Carroll to help Trojans open and finish strong

Eight weeks ago, on the first day of USC football’s summer workout program, Trumain Carroll hoped to drive home one particular message.

How you do one thing, he told the team, is how you do everything.

Carroll had just been hired as USC’s new strength in conditioning coach, replacing Bennie Wylie, who was abruptly let go in April. The late start for Carroll left him with only so much time to lay a foundation. But this lesson was especially critical. Not only was it one of his core beliefs as a strength coach, it was also one of the main reasons he was brought to USC, where discipline, especially late in games, had often unraveled.

Carroll knew, that first day, that he needed to make clear how much details mattered. So when the team was lacking effort during warm-ups, he made players start again. And again. Soon enough, before the workout even started, they were out of time.

“We were supposed to do some half-gassers that day,” Carroll said Wednesday, “but we didn’t make it to them. We didn’t make it for the simple reason that how you do one thing is how you do everything. That workout was a warm-up, learning the standard for how we warm-up, for one full hour.”

The message was received after that, Carroll says. The question now, as USC opened preseason camp on Wednesday, is whether it’ll show on the field.

A year ago, the Trojans inexplicably blew fourth-quarter leads in five of their six losses, often in devastating fashion. They also didn’t win a single conference game outside of L.A. in their debut Big Ten season, their only road victory coming in a close call at UCLA.

How you view those narrow losses is a matter of perspective. At the time, coach Lincoln Riley claimed it was a sign of how close USC was to being a contender.

Read more:USC's Lincoln Riley feeling 'refreshed' as pressure mounts to win in Year 4

But by spring, he’d settled on a new explanation. That the team needed someone else demanding discipline and calling for accountability. So he parted ways with Wylie, who’d come with him from Oklahoma four years ago, knowing that something needed to be done.

“We’ve had a lot of success together, a lot of success,” Riley said of Wylie at Big Ten media day. “It was not an easy decision. But I felt like for USC, at this time and place where our program was at, that we needed a new voice down there.”

That voice carried across Howard Jones Field early Wednesday morning, bellowing above the din of a Drake song at the start of USC’s first preseason practice. As he barked out the team’s next moves, Carroll paced between the Trojans' offense and defense, scanning for anything that might be amiss.

Watching him command the group, it wasn’t hard to see why Riley sought out such a firm hand for the job — and why Carroll has had little trouble thus far in getting the respect others say he demands.

“The way Coach T came in here and put his foot down early, we knew we weren’t going to have any problems,” said Trovon Reed, USC’s new cornerbacks coach. “Coach Tru yell at them sometimes, and I get scared.”

But before the yelling could be effective, Carroll wanted the players to know he respected them. He and his staff learned as many names as they could before the first workout, so the players would understand how serious they were about details.

The team was scheduled to run stairs at the Coliseum every Friday this summer. But after one walk through of the stadium, Carroll decided the players would need to prove they deserved the opportunity first.

“This is such a sacred place,” Carroll said of the Coliseum. “I don’t want to come in and disrespect it before we’re ready.”

Read more:Plaschke: At sagging USC, Lincoln Riley should be on the hottest of hot seats

Players and staff have raved about Carroll’s influence in the months since. But how much a new strength and conditioning staff can tangibly impact wins and losses for the Trojans remains to be seen.

Count Riley as one who believes Carroll’s hire will help close the gap for a team that was so close, so often last season.

“When you first get started, you’re just teaching guys what this stuff looks like,” Riley said. “Then they start really wanting to win and believing they can win, and that’s great, but at some point, that expectation has to got to go through the roof, where they know they’re going to win and they know exactly what to do. That’s obviously a big emphasis point for us. The better job you do at being consistent and demanding that out of the guys, the better job the team does to accept that and understand that every little thing is going to matter, the faster you become a championship team.”

Carroll knows he’s not capable of changing all that on his own.

When it comes to actually closing out games in the fourth quarter, he said, “I’m going to have a Powerade towel in one hand and a Powerade bottle in the other hand.

“But,” he continued, "I firmly believe you don’t rise to the occasion, you fall to the level of your training.”

And with Carroll in the building, no one seems all that worried about that baseline any longer.

Etc. 

Adrian Klemm, a former offensive line coach at UCLA, Oregon and in the NFL, has been hired to USC’s staff as a defensive analyst. … Wideout Ja’Kobi Lane was limited for USC’s first practice, but otherwise the Trojans open camp with a mostly clean bill of health.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.