Bio

The athletic department at Shawnee State University will have a new strength and conditioning coach for the 2024-25 season -- as former Portsmouth West High School graduate Dalton Meyers, who played collegiate soccer at NCAA Division II Tiffin and NAIA Alice Lloyd, will take the reigns in preparing athletic programs for competition from a training perspective.

"It's going to be a great experience," Meyers said. "I'm excited for it. I'm excited to meet all of the teams and all of the coaches and everything else -- get strength training and everything running smooth and conditioned. I want us to be the strongest teams whenever we play, and the best teams for competitions. I want us to be the best in the weight room with running and conditioning, and then I want all of that to correlate into the court and field."

Meyers, who is a 2018 graduate of Portsmouth West High School, earned OHSAA All-Southeast District billing as a senior in 2017 for the Senators as a soccer hand and went on to earn an opportunity to play collegiate soccer for Tiffin, where Meyers spent the next three years. Tiffin ultimately won two Great Midwest Athletic Conference (G-MAC) Championships in three years, helped the Dragons advance to the NCAA Division II Second Round in 2018 and 2019 and helped Tiffin collect a 33-13-6 overall mark.

After three seasons of playing for Tiffin, Meyers ultimately transferred to Alice Lloyd, where he finished his career leading the Eagles in assists in his lone season there. Meyers ultimately graduated with bachelor's degrees from both Tiffin (Health and Physical Education/Fitness) and Alice Lloyd (Sports and Exercise).

Since finishing his collegiate studies, Meyers has built up his reputation in the weight training world. A Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS), Meyers holds ISSA (International Sports Science Association) Certifications in strength and conditioning, personal training and nutrition.

"I'm constantly switching up routines," Meyers said. "Plateau is a major thing. Plateaus happen. It chases you down wherever you go, so you have to change splits every once in a while. I started with the basic chest and tricep, back and bicep, and I varied and did a chest and back, and then I went and did shoulders and arms, and then I did legs. What's worked best for me, and I've gotten stronger in the last year or so, has been focusing on a muscle group a day. I like doing nothing but chest, back, arms, bicep, tricep, and occasionally, shoulders, which can be thrown in with legs or can be thrown in with the back. Shoulders are a very hard muscle to work out without putting a lot of strain on it. It's just trying to find the balance of everything like that, and making sure that you are still gaining something every other week or something like that. You're not just going to plateau, and some people, when they plateau, they don't think they can change, and they're stuck there and then they just give up. We don't want that here. Whenever we get to that point, we have to have a conversation and figure out what can we do to get out of the plateau, and try to evolve and get into something else."

As a whole, Meyers simply wants to help Shawnee State achieve larger successes across the board among each of the 23 sponsored programs that the Bears currently field.

"I just want our programs to achieve greater success," Meyers said. "Many of the programs here have already achieved great success, but we can always be better in everything that we do. I don't want our student-athletes to look strong -- I want them to be strong. I want them to be as strong as they can and as quick as they can, and I want them to look intimidating to other teams and make teams question if they can really hang with teams here. I want everyone to be stronger, quicker and better in general."