Fifty New Faces, One Strategy: How UAB Is Rebuilding in the Weight Room

By Steve Irvine

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA - March 2, 2026

When it comes to getting to know you stage for a college football strength and conditioning staff in the winter months, creativity is needed when somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 players show up in roughly the same time period.

Welcome to the world  - or should we say the new world - of college football that UAB Director of Sports Performance Lyle Henley and his staff lived since the spring semester began in January.

“Sure, it's absolutely different,” Henley said. “You think about your having to flip your roster every single year, anywhere in the 40-to-60 guys range. You're normally not doing it with that many people. So not only are you bringing in so many new guys, you lost a lot of your nucleus. The majority of the players you're getting are from the portal and most of the high school kids are reporting early. So, you’re getting a big influx of people.”

Every one of them begins in the weight room and conditioning program. So, short of slapping a name tag on each one of them, how does a strength staff remember all the new names?

“It's hard but we kind of use a little cheat system,” Henley said. “We have a card that we look at every single day and we try to take turns calling roll or checking in guys. The first thing for me is I’m able to correlate where a kid came from and I remember them from the (recruiting) visit. I try to make it as personal as possible on the visit. We kind of know the guys (during recruiting) who we really want to come here. You build that and you kind of prepare yourself for that on the front end. We're going to throw them in the fire, so I want to make them feel as comfortable as possible. But yeah, you'll have a guy, there's a lot of times I forgot a guy's name, but I remember where he's from and so I can go in and get my little cheat sheet on my desk.”

Another challenge was the way the schedule worked out with the only transfer portal recruiting period coming in January. Programs throughout the country were filling their rosters and getting the new players enrolled for the spring semester but the first day of classes was unique to each university. At UAB, the first day of spring semester classes and the final deadline for getting players into spring classes were about 10 days apart. That created a situation where not all of the players were starting winter workouts on the same day, which was challenging because of the way the workouts were structured.

“Number one, you have to get them back to a baseline to be able to even evaluate them,” Henley said. “You don't really know what you have. You've got to kind of take it a little bit slower than normally and look at some more basic things than you normally would. That’s from an athletic standpoint, from a physiological standpoint from a team building standpoint, you've got to reset the culture. You've got to kind of find ways, number one, to get to know these kids better, to build a relationship from coach to player. You're trying to foster relationships from player to player, and you're trying to build a team atmosphere. Because you know, you really only have seven weeks, seven to eight, nine weeks somewhere in that from when you get them to when they're going to start practicing together (during spring practice).”

UAB doesn’t have a large group of returnees, particularly compared to the traditional makeup of college football program, but Henley said those players have made this process work. He singled out the leadership of quarterback Ryder Burton and center Adam Lepkowski on offense and defensive lineman Nigel Tate on defense. But he added the list of leaders among the returnees runs deep.

“So you talk to those guys and be like, look, you guys that have been here, you're the foundation,” Henley said of the returnees. “You are setting the foundation for the team, the tone what this is going to be. And our success will be based on what you guys are able to show them, like the picture of what it looks like when you come in. The (returning) guys issue did an excellent job. We had new guys showing up every day (in January), instead of having to reteach it, they just kind of rolled with it and they saw that's the way it was.”So, you know, hats off to those guys this year because I think we've done a really good job this offseason so far of doing that.”

Time will tell the talent level this team. Spring practice, which begins on March 18 and concludes with the Spring Showcase on April 18, should paint a more clear picture of what Alex Mortensen and his staff are working with when fall camp begins. For now, though, the UAB staff is learning about their players one workout session at a time.

“I do like what I see,” Henley said. “I think we've got the right guys. Everybody looks good in the offseason, right? Everybody's looking good and feeling good right now. It's the way that they handle the day-to-day that makes a difference. You know, if a Friday is hard, can they turn around and come back on Monday and be at the top of the game? The offseason training is when the grind really is starting to set in. Are they able to come in every single day and do the things they need to do outside of here to be able to be successful? When I say the right guys, you know, everybody's looking for the formula for trying to catch lightning in a bottle every year. We feel like we have the right guys in the building right now to be successful.”