When the Eagles announced new head coach Chip Kelly’s full coaching staff, one of the names on the list was Shaun Huls, the new sports science coordinator.
That raises a couple of questions: Who is Shaun Huls, and what is a sports science coordinator?
According to USA Today, Huls was the strength, conditioning and combatives coordinator for Navy Special Warfare, meaning he was training Navy SEALs before he took a job in which he’ll be training the Eagles.
That’s a surprising background for someone to become an NFL assistant coach, but with Kelly, maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise. In a 2010 interview with the New York Times, Kelly said that in preparing his Oregon team for the up-tempo style that he prefers, he employed a lot of the same conditioning techniques that he had learned about from studying the way the Navy SEALs train.
“You see how they train the Navy SEALs,” Kelly said. “They squirt them with water, play loud music and do all these other things when they have to perform a task. That’s how we practice. We want to bombard our kids.”
With sports science coordinator Shaun Huls on the staff, the players on the Eagles should prepare to be bombarded with some intense offseason conditioning.