This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune, to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through student journalism.

The first time that University of Utah basketball assistant coach Dasia Young saw Lindsey Kirschman, the reaction was visceral.

“I was like ‘dang, she’s jacked, like she’s ripped,’” Young said.

It’s not easy to create a body that looks like that. It’s even harder to maintain it at 37 years old. But Kirschman loves a challenge.

Now, as she ends her third season as the director of sports performance for women’s basketball at the University of Utah, Kirschman’s challenge is keeping the team in shape. That includes daily workouts, lifts, conditioning, or anything else she thinks the athletes need.

The Utes finished the regular season with a 22-7 record, good enough for sixth place in the Big 12 in their first year in the conference. In the postseason, they scored a No. 8 seed in last month’s NCAA Tournament and lost in the first round to Indiana.

Much of the team’s work happens when no one is watching. In the summertime, college basketball players are restricted by NCAA rules that govern how much they can practice on a court, so that’s when they spend the most time strength training to prepare for the upcoming season.

The workouts can be grueling. But Kirschman said she won’t ask anything of a player she wouldn’t do — or that she wouldn’t be excited to do.

“A lot of my hobbies involve physical discomfort,” she said. “My best days are the days where I am just physically exhausted at the end of them.”

That’s what assistant coach Jordan MacIntyre said the players need, too.

“We play a really fast, up-tempo style of basketball, and we have to be able to get up and down the floor and be in our best physical shape to play the brand that we want to play,” MacIntyre said. “That is so much of a credit to the work that she puts in with people outside of our season.”

All of that effort, MacIntyre said, permits the team “the ability to play the style we want to play.”

Kirschman ‘absolutely motivates them’

Kirschman’s days have early starts. She wakes up around 4 a.m., reads, writes in her journal, goes on a run with her dog, works until 2 p.m., does her own workout, and then goes to bed around 9:30 p.m. She’ll often go to the athletic facility at 4 or 5 in the morning to do the workout that she’s planning on putting her athletes through later that day.

“She actually knows what she’s talking about, which is nice, because, you know, sometimes strength and conditioning coaches don’t look like what they preach,” Young said.

Even though she has often already gone through the workout, Kirschman doesn’t hesitate to jump in alongside the players. At a team lift in late February, for instance, she was stretching, planking and demonstrating different exercises to athletes who needed help. The workout culminated in Kirschman pushing a sled that carried Alyssa Blanck, the Utes’ 6-foot, 2-inch sophomore forward, across 20 yards of turf while the team cheered on the sideline.

“I know that they see her own drive. She can have them do whatever in their workouts because they know she’s doing it, too, and she’s probably done it already before we’ve done it,” MacIntyre said. “That absolutely motivates them and she has such an element of respect because of it.”

Strength coaches at the collegiate and professional levels often have degrees in athletic training, kinesiology or sports medicine. Kirschman, on the other hand, earned her bachelor’s degree in environmental science at the University of Washington, where she also competed in track and field.

She then began graduate school for rangeland management. During this period, she started coaching at a high school in her free time and found herself pulled back to the world of sports.

“I would sneak out every afternoon to go volunteer coach at a high school in town,” Kirschman said. But soon she thought, “Why am I sneaking around to do something that I could just do for my job?”

She switched programs to start studying education. After finishing her master’s program, she taught science and coached track and field, cross country, and strength and conditioning at Poudre High School in Fort Collins, Colorado.

“I think a lot of my own coaches have been role models and that’s part of the reason why I wanted to be a coach, because as an athlete I thought about who has had the biggest impact in my life in a positive way and it’s always coaches,” Kirschman said. “I wanted to be that for other athletes.”

Kirschman taught and coached for eight years in Colorado. Eventually she began thinking about how she could take herself to the next level. Being a high school strength coach often means having a lot of teams to oversee, and Kirschman grew tired of working with that many athletes at once.

“I was coaching before school, teaching all day, coaching after school, coaching all summer, but I had hundreds of athletes,” she said. “You can only do so much with each one individual athlete when you’ve got 300 more coming.”

She found a new opportunity at the University of Central Arkansas, as the school’s assistant strength and conditioning coach. Kirschman took a 50% pay cut — and was still training hundreds of athletes — but the prospect of a new mountain to climb was enticing.

“The challenge of that was appealing to me. I wanted to be held accountable to the highest standard possible, and have that risk of, if you’re not good at your job you’re going to get fired,” Kirschman said. “It’s kind of hard to fire someone at the high school level. … I want to see if I have what it takes to hang.”

Kirschman’s teaching experience has been a benefit.

“She comes with a lot of different experiences that a lot of other strength coaches don’t have… she does a lot of teaching of exercises,” Utah women’s basketball athletic trainer Christina Jones said. “She has all of those fundamentals down very well and can connect with the athletes and really hones into the teaching aspect.”

After one season in Arkansas, the University of Utah women’s basketball program hired Kirschman. In Utah, she finally got her wish of working with athletes on an individual level.

“First time in my career that I only had one team to work with,” she said. “I went from working with 300-plus athletes to working with 14, and that’s been a huge blessing and learning experience.”

Tough in the weight room, but ‘kind-hearted’

Her one-on-one work with athletes doesn’t go unnoticed. Jones noted that Kirschman is especially focused when it comes to injured players. Any time the team is on the road, she gets up early with the athletes who are injured to put them through a workout in the hotel gym before breakfast.

“I think it’s a cool thing that she does, and the ability to adapt and be able to do that in the hotel,” Jones said. “It’s hard to do that when your other teammates aren’t doing that when you’re hurt.”

It’s that attentiveness that gives Kirschman one of her greatest strengths as a coach. Those who work with her say she has an innate kindness, an ability to make connections with people, that lifts her to the next level. Anyone who works with or plays for Kirschman will sooner or later be likely to receive a valentine in their locker, a note, a treat she’s baked, or a moment where she genuinely checks in because she cares.

“She’s probably one of the most, if not the most, kind-hearted people I’ve ever worked with, let alone met,” MacIntyre said. “She really is someone that cares to be there for other people, and wants her impact to be so much more than just teaching people how to get stronger.”

Kirschman gets the best results from people, Young said, because she has their best interests at heart.

“Nobody’s ever going to listen to their teacher if they don’t like them or if they don’t believe in what they do,” Young said. “She mastered that perfectly — to get people to do hard things and enjoy it at the same time.”

Kirschman said she knows that players respect her because she is a good strength coach but, she said, “people love me because of the impact I have on their lives and in their heart and that I have a relationship with them.”

That love can be leveraged into the sort of trust she needs, from her athletes, to get them to do things they might not do otherwise.

“She just always made sure that we didn’t settle. I could be curling 25s and she’s like, ‘Babe, you can definitely go to 40.’ I’m like, ‘I could but do I want to?’ and she’ll come pick up those 40s and hand them to me,” Young said. “I can do more. That’s probably what I took away from her the most: that I can do more. Whatever that is.”

Natalie Newton wrote this story as a journalism student at the University of Utah for a capstone course focused on women’s sports. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.