Even if you’re a regular visitor to Yates Field House, you probably don’t pay any attention to the small walled-off area in the back left of the track and tennis courts, with the sounds of constant loud music and the occasional crashing of weights echoing into the rest of the gym.

In reality, though – and this may be tough for intramural basketball warriors to hear – this is the most important part of Yates, and the most overlooked part of Georgetown’s athletic department.

Staffed by only two full-time university employees, the Georgetown strength and conditioning program is responsible for keeping all of Georgetown’s athletes in top shape.

Despite the small staff and relatively small capacity of the facility, the strength and conditioning coaches have a big job to do to make sure every athlete is healthy and ready to deal with the rigors of long, physically exhausting seasons.

“Every hour, this space is utilized,” Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach Mike Hill said. “We’re jammed in here every day. . We’re only limited by how many [strength] coaches we have, their time and this space.”

Hill and Carl Johnson are the only two full-time strength coaches, and while they do an exemplary job of scheduling and training roughly 750 student-athletes, none of that would be possible without the assistance they receive in running the weight room from interns coming from schools including George Mason, The George Washington University and American, and from as far away as Johns Hopkins.

“If we didn’t have those college kids coming in for internships . this place wouldn’t survive [with] just two guys in here [managing] 750 athletes,” Hill said.

With the help of those interns and various other part-time staffers, what has to be done gets done, albeit sometimes at an hour that is less than ideal.

“We have all the equipment,” Hill said. “[But] if we had enough coaches, if we had enough space . [we wouldn’t] have to wake the swimming team up at 5:30.”

At the same time, though, Hill realizes that the small footprint of the weight room can have the unintended benefit of fostering a great sense of community and allowing the small staff to give every athlete the personal attention required to maximize his or her physical talents and abilities.

“Programs like LSU and Alabama have the biggest facilities ever,” he said. “But are they really getting any good work in? Are all of the bells and whistles really worth it? I really don’t know.”

Hill is fully aware that the men’s basketball team is the flagship program of Georgetown’s entire athletic operation and takes pride in the fact that it – unlike similarly huge programs at other schools – receives the same level of personal attention as its lesser-publicized brethren.

“There’s not one team in here that we hate training,” Hill said. “We just want to help the university as a whole and [help] the kids get better and help the standards get better. . It’s pretty rewarding whether it’s a tennis, football or basketball guy. Top to bottom I think we treat everyone the same.”

One of the more basic problems that the staff faces, in fact, is getting everyone to the point where they can be treated reasonably the same. With the athletic program’s size and diversity, freshmen arrive at Georgetown with weight training experience that runs the gamut from complete ignorance to deep understanding of all the machines, exercises and the roles they play.

“We get kids who have never lifted before, who haven’t ever been in a weight room before,” Hill said. “We’ve had kids come in and actually had to pull them back a little bit because they know too much.”

Once the schedule and baseline competence are established, the coaches can begin improving their charges’ strength and conditioning. Complicating that particular job, which already varies wildly between off-season conditioning – which focuses primarily on building up strength – and in-season training – which is focused more on increasing endurance and shortening recovery times from game to game – are the breaks when the vast majority of the student body heads home to weeks of relaxation.

“With college kids, their bodies adapt so quickly [that] if you get them in the [weight] room and they’re doing what you put on the card, that’s half the battle right there,” Hill said. “But when they go home for Christmas or the summer . that’s when you lose a whole lot of that [work].”

Beyond the day-to-day management of each team’s and player’s weight training and conditioning programs, the strength and conditioning coaches have a huge role to play in most Hoyas’ rehab process, which is a process made more complicated by the distance between the athletic department’s training staff in McDonough Arena and Hill and Johnson’s Yates location.

“The trainers down [at McDonough] tell us what to do,” Hill said. “We administer [treatment] up here, but we still have to relay it back and forth and there’s always that communication gap.”

That gap is being steadily closed, though, through the hard work of the training and strength staffs, as well as moves by the athletic department such as hiring a personal trainer to work more closely with the Yates staff.

Someday, Hill and his colleagues hope to have a facility for themselves, but for now they toil away in the corner of Yates. That hope may be nothing more than a pipe dream for the coaches, but Hill takes comfort in knowing that they are still accomplishing big things for Georgetown athletics from that little space – and for now, that’ll have to do.”