On Wednesday’s edition of Tech Talk Live, Virginia Tech men’s basketball’s Hisham Ziyout and Mike Young joined Zach Mackey and Mike Burnop.
Ziyout coordinates all sports medicine needs for the Hokies and has been with the program since 2017. Young is in his seventh season as Tech’s head coach and has the team at 11-15 (6-9 ACC) this year.
After a tough road loss on Tuesday at Boston College, the Hokies are at Miami on Saturday (6 p.m. ET, ACCN).
Hisham Ziyout
How are you?
Good, I appreciate y’all having me.
What does your day-to-day look like in the training room with these guys?
It usually starts in the morning with a lift with Coach [David] Jackson. If a guy needs treatment after the lift, I’ll get with him one-on-one. If a guy is injured, I’ll talk with Coach Jackson before the lift to let him know about it. He and I kind of bounce ideas off of each other. This way, Coach Jackson can put together the best lift possible for him and help him get through that lift without causing any pain and still getting the most out of him. Then we have treatment or downtime. At about 10:30, I’ll walk towards Chipotle for lunch, and as soon as I get back, we get ready for treatments. Then we have practice, then treatments again after practice. That’s a pretty typical day if all goes well.
What about in the summertime? What’s the daily grind look like then?
Summer is nice. They’re lifting a little more often, maybe four times a week. They’ll go at 6 a.m. with lift, then treatments. Then they do more individual-related workouts in the afternoon before finishing up around 2 p.m. Pretty light, love the summer. Things are calm.
You got your undergrad from Salisbury University and then did a two-year internship at Johns Hopkins. What was it like being at one of the premier medical institutions?
It was awesome, I could not have asked for a better experience. I got so lucky to work with four great coaches. I got to work men’s lacrosse there, which is their premier sport. I was the assistant trainer for that. I got to learn a lot from him about what it was like to be at a high-level sport. I also had volleyball, women’s basketball and water polo that I worked on by myself. I got to learn a lot and see a lot. But with that, I got the experience to learn from somebody who is really good at their job and learn a lot from him.
What kind of injuries happen in water polo?
I had a guy get his leg bitten. That was one of the weirdest injuries I’ve had. Somebody just bit his Achilles. Water polo has all types of injuries because what you can’t see is happening under water.
Talk about your journey to get to Virginia Tech.
When I graduated from undergrad from Salisbury and went for that internship at Johns Hopkins, I was only expecting it to be one year. I applied for a GA here at Virginia Tech after that one year and didn’t get it. My girlfriend at the time told me to reapply next year and hope for a different result, so I did and got the GA position. I was on cloud nine, I was so happy and so relieved. I felt like all my hard work had finally come true. A few months later, they told me I was going to work football. I was so, so happy, just true bliss. I am so thankful and so fortunate.
It seems that major knee injuries are starting to affect the younger levels of sports. You hear about so many high school kids getting knee surgeries. What do you attribute that to?
With basketball, this goes year round, even at the high school level with AAU. You can attribute it a lot to kids playing one sport. In the past, you’d see these kids playing football, then basketball, then baseball. Now it’s more tailored to kids playing basketball year round so that they can put all their effort into that sport. I think that can cause some overuse problems. If you break a stick, you break it right in the middle, and that’s where the knee is. I think that can be attributed to it as well.
When you meet younger athletes, do you ever get questions about what their weight-room routines should look like?
What they do in high school is not what they do here. There is a different intensity level. Now with the transfer portal, we get as many or more transfers as we do incoming freshmen. Those guys have been taught things at their previous schools; sometimes it’s more than one previous school. My answer is always just to go see Coach Jackson for any advice on strength & conditioning. I get questions from friends or people in the community, but in terms of our players, I always refer them to Coach Jackson.
How much of your work is injury prevention?
A lot of it. The most time I spend is trying to avoid problems. I view us as an insurance policy — you don’t want to deal with us until you need it. So much of my time, effort and thoughts go towards preventing a problem. Seeing a problem before it comes is a skill, and I think I’ve developed that skill a little in my time here. There’s so many things that can go wrong. The experience I’ve gotten here in six years in basketball — I know Coach Young, I know Coach Jackson, I know the game in terms of how it’s going to go with the schedule. I don’t know the X’s and O’s at all, but I do know about what’s coming up. The decisions and choices that we make today come together with how it impacts the game coming up. I’m constantly trying to avoid issues. A boring, quiet training room is the best. Sometimes I catch myself thinking, “Man, this is boring. When is this going to end?” Then I have to remind myself that it’s a good thing for the trainer to not be busy. It’s a bad sign if they are.
Sometimes with the athlete, you can see where he’s trying to take this and prevent a problem from coming up. I will say, in terms of preventing injuries, so much of it truly comes from the head coach and the strength coach. That’s in all sports too, not just basketball. The way the head coach trains them and practices them, what time he gets them up in the morning, all types of things like that. The strength coach, what he does in the weight room to prevent problems. Those two are crucial when it comes to preventing injuries. I say this all the time because it’s true, the way Coach Young and Coach Jackson are, they prevent so many problems for me because of the way that they program and train the players. It’s a huge help to me.
Talk about the nutrition part of it. For that 9 p.m. game against Boston College, the guys basically had four meals.
If a guy is trying to gain weight, the road is a great time to do it, especially with a 9 p.m. game. The guys did eat four times. Of course, we still have protein shakes, water, Gatorade and plenty of snacks. The work that Savannah Gustafson has done this year has been remarkable. She’s done things differently this year that has really helped us. What she and the whole nutrition department do with the SAPC we have, they’ve got so much to eat, so many resources for them in the player lounge and all the snacks available to them, the meals that they have ordered too. Nutrition and what you put in your body is a huge part. It’s no different than putting good fuel in your car. We all know what it’s like when you put good food in your body — you feel better. These guys have a lot of good food around them.
How do you prevent something like the flu from going around?
It reminds me of COVID. They are constantly around each other. All you’re trying to do is reduce the spread of an illness. The only way to prevent it is isolation, and that isn’t good for anyone. You cannot completely prevent anything. You try to educate them in the fall about getting their flu shots. Educating them on good hygiene, washing their hands, covering their cough, things like that. At the end of the day, you’ve got 15 guys in a locker room, they’re going to be on the plane, they’re going to have a roommate at the hotels, those things are going to happen. All you can do is try to reduce the spread. The biggest thing for that comes with education.
When you look back at COVID, do you ever wonder how you made it through that with all the testing?
I don’t know how we got through it, but I’m glad we did. I’m glad we were successful that year, too. We made it to the NCAA Tournament with the bubble in Indy, that was such a cool experience. But the way we got through it was because of the people that were here. What Dr. Rogers, Mike Goforth, Kelsey DeShambo, all of the people who helped with all of the testing and coordinating everything, I learned so much from them in that time frame. You talk about trying to prevent problems and see two steps ahead of you with what’s going on. They taught me so much about thinking outside the box and making things work.
The job that year was to keep staff, players and family healthy, and then try to play basketball if possible. We did that, thank God. It took a lot of effort and a lot of buy-in from a lot of people and I’m very grateful that we were healthy that year. I believe that we had zero positive tests that year. We had some contact tracing issues, but nobody was seriously sick. Because of that, we got to play basketball and go to the NCAA Tournament in what is hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime experience in that bubble.
What is some of the technology that you guys use in the athletic training room?
We use a bunch of different modalities. Obviously, stem, ultrasound, the TheraGun, Normatecs. We’ve got blood flow restriction that we use for surgeries; we don’t use it outside of that. Those are very useful. Very similar to a blood pressure cuff around the extremity. It’s really good for rehab. We have an anti-gravity treadmill in our training room — we can run a guy coming back from injury at 30 percent of their body weight to aid the rehab process. It’s also nice for a transfer who’s had a bunch of surgeries or a fifth-year guy that’s been here a while to be able to get them on the anti-gravity treadmill to reduce pressure on his legs. He’s still getting the cardio, but he’s not as much ground and pound. That helps with wear and tear. The anti-gravity treadmill is really helpful. We travel with something called Firefly — it’s like a watch band essentially that you put around the leg right below your knee and causes a flutter in the lower leg. We use it a lot if a guy has an ankle swollen. That pumping action gets some of the swelling out of their ankle. Especially on the plane with the pressure changes, and the guy can just be sitting there for an hour, that unit is really nice on the plane for guys who are injured or want to recover a little bit. It’s been very helpful.
Can you tell us some funny stories about Coach Young?
First time I met him, he introduced himself. I told him my name and he said, “What?” I said, “Hisham.” He said, “Son, I’m from Southwest Virginia. It’s going to take me a while to get that one.” He’s been great to me, I couldn’t ask for any better.
What about at the end of the bench that one time?
A couple of years ago at practice, I was checking my email. I looked at an email from coach to the whole staff. He had forwarded a message from someone in the ACC about some guy at the end of the bench with a shaved head that was a little too animated and getting on the court too much. They said to him that if this doesn’t stop, they’re going to have to do something about it. He got us all together and we’re preparing for Memphis and Xavier up in Brooklyn. He gave us an earful and I felt so bad. The guys are trying to prepare for the game and I’m wasting their time on a meeting about my theatrics at the end of the bench. He sends me out of the office and right as I leave, they all start laughing at me. I’ve got that fake email framed in my office now. I’ll never forget that.
