About
Coach Martens taught high school for 36 years, built one of the largest strength programs in Michigan, and spent 15 of those years getting his athletes in front of college programs that had never heard of them.
Why it matters
Four things have to be true before anybody should take a recruiting evaluation or a training system on faith. Here is where each one comes from.
The long version
36 years, in order.
Coach Martens played Division I football at Western Michigan under Jack Harbaugh, and was a member of the 1988 MAC Championship team. Greg Mattison and Dan Ferrigno coached him, and John Harbaugh was a graduate assistant on that defensive staff. Decades later, two of those coaches wrote testimonials for this website.
He was hired in 2000. There was no job description to inherit and no model to copy, so he built one. He drove to college and NFL programs and sat in the back of the room taking notes on technique, drills, cueing, and the way coaches ran a room. All of it went back into a curriculum he still treats as a living document.
East Kentwood is one of the largest high schools in Michigan and one of the most diverse in the country. Every hour, another 70-plus athletes came through on the same unified system, all held to the same technique standard. The proof came back from the colleges: strength coaches kept saying they had never had a freshman arrive that prepared.
East Kentwood had Division I talent and almost no Division I attention, and nobody in the building was doing the other work. So he asked to do it. He wrote a recruiting curriculum from nothing and started making calls on his own time for kids who had no other advocate. Within a few years college coaches were coming to East Kentwood, and families were moving into the district because of it.
There are companies that do recruiting at scale. What they do not have is a college staff on the other end who knows them by name and takes the call. That took more than 15 years of showing up in person before there was anything in it for him, and never sending a staff a player who was not exactly what he said he was. It is also why he takes only a small number of families at a time.
Coach Martens sat down to lunch in Nashville with Matt Hasselbeck, whose son he had guided through recruiting. Matt told him nobody else does what he does, and that he should be building a practice around it. He signed his first client shortly after. That athlete committed to Boston College.
Why he does it
“When we leave this earth, it's all about the lives we've touched, the lives that have touched us, and the relationships we've made along the way.”
“That's why I do what I do. That's my passion.”
Whether it is an athlete, a weight room, or a room full of coaches, the first step is the same. Tell Coach Martens what you are working on.
