The Ashland Athletics department is excited to welcome its new Head Strength and Conditioning Coach, Corey Mason. 

 He joined the athletics department to elevate the fitness and performance levels of student-athletes across all sports. 

Although Mason was hired to aid student athletes in the weight room to better their performance on the field, he wishes to create a certain environment for student-athletes. 

“I hope that I can create an environment that is competitive, very energy giving for the athletes right,” Mason said.  “So, one of the biggest things here about coming in now is just creating structure and organization.” 

Mason finds people, especially student-athletes, crave structure and organization to help them push themselves to be the best version they can. 

He’s been at AU for less than a month and is already implementing this by getting new equipment to track growth. 

“I was just able to buy some jump metric tracking devices, some spring metric tracking devices, we’ll be tracking a lot of our data to be able to longitudinally say objectively say ‘are we better than we were before’, right?” Mason said. 

Structure, organization, and equipment aside, Mason finds the mind plays a huge part in performance.  

Due to this, Mason urges student-athletes to ask themselves questions to challenge their mental: “Can you still show up with a great attitude?  Can you still try really hard? Can you still be grateful for the opportunities that you have? And can you do that regardless of the situations that you’re in?”  

These questions, Mason finds challenge student-athletes’ way of thinking that then translates into the weight room and on the field. 

He goes as to far to reference Joshua Medcalf’s book “Win in The Dark” where the author states “True Mental Toughness Have a great attitude. Give your very, very best. Treat people really, really well. Operate with unconditional gratitude. Even when you think your circumstances suck.” 

This translates to how he hopes to inspire student athletes to conduct themselves: “Improve themselves, push themselves really hard, be a great teammate, and learn how to be a mentally resilient athlete that will carry over to their sport and hopefully win some more championships as well,” Mason said. 

He wishes to leave a mark on not only the athletics department, but AU as a whole.  He embodies the idea of a strong mentality and hopes it translates campus-wide. 

“When I’m walking around campus and say hi, or give me a high five or give me a fist bump,” Mason said.  “Be able to provide that type of energy to the campus that’s positive and can help our student athletes and non-student athletes feel more positive about their experience here at Ashland as well.”