Indiana Basketball: The luxury of having Clif Marshall on staff

Indiana Basketball strength coach Clif Marshall is the best in the business

“He’s skilled and athletic, but he needs to fill out with more muscle and gain strength.” We’ve all heard this around the time of the NBA Draft. A consistent theme of young athletes is that their bodies are often lagging behind their skill level. There are plenty of stories about young prospects who were skinny as a rail before getting to the NBA and putting on the size that took their game up a notch. Kevin Durant, for instance, couldn’t even bench press a single rep of the 185-pound bar used to measure strength in the NBA combine.

Indiana may not have the track record for being a hub of 21st-century NBA talent, but that is likely to change because of a weapon in Bloomington that other schools just don’t have. I’m talking about strength and conditioning coach, Clif Marshall.

Marshall was the Performance Director at Ignition Athletics Performance Group for 10 years before coming to IU under Archie Miller. He has trained some of the most elite athletes in professional sports, including perennial Pro-Bowlers AJ Green and the now-retired Luke Keuchly.

Simply put, there are few better strength and conditioning coaches at any level than Marshall. All you need to do is check social media to see the transformation players make over the offseason.

Marshall’s mastery of his craft gives the Hoosiers a recruiting weapon that few other schools can match. The problem of being too skinny is such a common thread among top-tier high school talent, and the remedy is usually to get to the NBA and get on an NBA weight-lifting program. Not at IU.

When recruits come to play basketball for Indiana, they can expect to get a massive head start on transforming their body. Recruits like Khristian Lander will come into Bloomington looking like twigs and leave looking like the hulk. That is a major selling point for elite recruits with NBA aspirations, and as the years go by, I think you will begin to see a theme of Indiana players on draft night with NBA-ready bodies.

On top of this, Marshall helps his players increase their athleticism exponentially –bench presses, deadlifts, squats, vertical jumps, you name it. Every single summer, every player on the Indiana roster gets stronger, faster, and more vertically inclined.

Simply put, Coach Marshall is excellent at his work and is a key building block for this program. It’s always great to know that Assembly Hall is where the best in the business wants to be, and that is certainly true in the weight room.