Matt Gildersleeve making a fast impact with program

Lance Leipold has on been record several times talking about the gains and positive impact Matt Gildersleeve has had on the Kansas program.

Gildersleeve, who oversees the strength and conditioning program and sports performance, has also been praised by the players. When quarterback Jalon Daniels was asked what has him feeling positive about the program his answer centered around Gildersleeve.

"When Coach Sleeve first got here, he implemented a culture that I've never seen before in my life," Daniels said. "Being able to transition from going from spring ball to this new program with Coach Sleeve and the way he runs things, it's more of a up-tempo type of thing.

"Even when we're in the weight room, we're going to treat it like we're on the field, move around everywhere, no walking around, jog around to the next rack, to the next play on the field, to the huddle, everywhere."

Gildersleeve appeared on a pre-practice interview with Brian Hanni to talk about some of the accomplishments the players have seen since his arrival. Read the Q&A below.

BH: Total fat mass lost, 244 pounds. That's 2.2 pounds per player. Total muscle mass gained, 372 pounds. 3.4 pounds per player. This has just in a couple summer months. And then you look at the vertical leaps. Guys that are putting on multiple inches in their ability to leap. How have you gotten it done in such a short window of time?

Gildersleeve: It definitely was an extremely productive summer to say the least. But I'll make it clear that I didn't do anything. It was our athletes that did it. The level of buy-in and the speed at which they bought in to the culture, to the program, we wouldn't have had a shot at these results without that. So that's not easy to do. You have a whole new regime coming in and to just really full faith and full buy-in just right off the first day we trained, that was a big piece.

But our thing is we were going to maximize every single resource we had here. We thought when we came and we talked to people, we saw what the skeleton and the bones were, and we wanted to actually utilize every resource we had. So, we really started with nutrition, where a lot of things changed nutritionally around here from a standpoint of supplementation. We developed what we'll call supplemental scripts.

Each individual guy on our team had their own individual supplemental script down to the ratio of carbohydrate to protein when they were post-workout recovery drinks. Those details all matter. But the impact was incredible. I mean, guys, Armaj Reed-Adams lost 27 pounds of fat mass. Adagio lost 17 pounds of fat mass, gained 17 pounds of muscle mass. So just some things that I've never seen in my career, but it all stems down to the buy-in.

BH: Let's talk about the vertical leap. I understand when you showed up, not a single player on the roster had a vertical leap north of 40 inches. Now, five do. Tell me about some of the guys that gained in that category.

Gildersleeve: Yeah, there was a handful of guys that made some pretty impressive jumps towards it. I Ra'Mello Dotson was a guy who put five inches on his vertical jump. Amauri (Pesek-Hickson) is a guy that put seven inches on his vertical jump. Jalon Daniels didn't get to 40, but he put eight inches on his vertical jump this summer, which was just incredible. And a lot of specific training to those kinds of modalities of what we were looking at that really helped it to take those up.

BH: All right, tell me about some of the other workout warriors. You mentioned Jalon Daniels. I understand he put on a lot of muscle, as well. You also gave out a golden sledge hammer, the Hammer Award. Who did that go to?

Gildersleeve: Yeah, so the Hammer Award kind of embodies the guy that pushes the needle the most in our program and really takes hold of our culture and demands it out of his players. But Miles Kendrick did a phenomenal job this summer. And the real thing is, these guys had what we called captain's practices this summer, or we call it team tech, and it's just players out here.

They have the clock running, there's periods going, and Miles was out here and he would lead those and run those. And to me, that was the most impressive thing of how he grabbed the team and really demanded his presence. That was very impressive. But he did it every day, the weight room, on the field, didn't matter, and that's ultimately what got him the award.

BH: Other standouts, I'm told tight end Mason Fairchild was great in the summer months. I'm told Kyron Johnson at linebacker had a big summer. Can you elaborate on those guys?

Gildersleeve: Kyron is a generational type athlete. Some of the things that I've seen him do, just incredibly impressive. He ran a 1.39 10-yard split, which is indicative of like a 4.2 40. There's obviously 30 more yards to go that a lot of things can happen, but that's a 10-yard split I've never seen in my career. Over a 40-inch vertical jump. And then just from a standpoint of doing it at 240 pounds is even more impressive. So, he was phenomenal.

Mason's big thing that I really thought, yes, he did have a good numbers summer, but from a standpoint of culture and driving the culture, he was one of the best we had. From an energy, enthusiasm standpoint, from a level of buy-in and just behind the scenes, what he did for our team from a leadership standpoint of really cultivating what we were looking for, he's a big piece of it. Big, big piece.

BH: You talk about all the goals that were reached in the summer months. What are the objectives now in the last 30 days leading up to kickoff?

Well, it's different than it's ever been in the past because we're doing something that hasn't been done before. We have four weeks and yesterday was the first time we saw any of these guys play football. And ultimately, they don't come here to play weight-lifting, they come here to play football. And it's that transitional period that most people are coming off an off-season and going into spring ball and they have time. We don't have time. We don't have time to teach strain and time to teach effort. Those are things that they've got to do, and we've got to continue to develop.

So at this point, you're trying to kind of squeeze spring ball in, you're trying to squeeze camp in, and then we still physically, we have to develop too. We have a lot of young guys on this roster and we have a lot of guys that just have very young training ages. They haven't been training very long. Our roster is freshmen and sophomore heavy. Those guys need to be physically developed still. And there's going to be a time in this program very soon when we walk out on the field and people fear us visually because of that. And we're going to continue to develop those guys in-season. They got a taste of that yesterday. We squatted pretty damn heavy yesterday and that's something that we're going to do in this program year-round. And they responded to it. It was just a lot of fun.