Every year, athletes tear ACLs, pull hamstrings, and blow out knees in ways that a stronger, better-prepared body might have avoided. And every year, we hear the same excuse for skipping strength training and avoiding the weight room: “I don’t want it to mess with my game.” “I’m embarrassed I can’t lift what everyone else does.” “I’ll get to it eventually.”
For Episode 2 of Skol Sessions, I sat down with Donyell Marshall — UConn’s first consensus first-team All-American, the first Husky to leave school early for the NBA, the No. 4 overall pick in the 1994 draft, and a 15-year NBA veteran who once tied the league record for three-pointers in a single game with 12. Donyell spent years at Viking Athletics training with us after his playing career ended, and he’s now an assistant coach with the Greensboro Swarm, the Charlotte Hornets’ G League affiliate, after a stint as head coach at Central Connecticut State.
Donyell’s story is a case study in exactly the excuse-making that keeps people out of the weight room — and exactly what it costs when you skip strength training. What follows is an edited version of our conversation. You can watch the full conversation, or read the synopsis below:
Take us through your athletic background for anyone who didn’t watch you at UConn or in the NBA.
I’m from Reading, Pennsylvania. I got recruited heavily out of high school and ended up at UConn — it came down to Connecticut, Syracuse, and Maryland. I was the first McDonald’s All-American to play there, ended up the school’s first consensus All-American, and the first player to ever leave UConn early for the NBA. I got drafted 4th overall in 1994. I played 15 years in the league across eight teams, some by trade, some as a free agent. I once tied the record for most three-pointers in a game with 12. I retired in 2009, did a year of TV with the 76ers doing pre- and post-game shows, and then got into coaching in 2011. This is my 10th year coaching — I was head coach at Central Connecticut State for a chunk of that, and now I’m with the Greensboro Swarm, the Hornets’ G League team.
When you were coming up through college, what did strength and conditioning actually look like for you?
Traditional stuff — squats, bench, curls, Olympic lifting. But honestly, one of the reasons I avoided the weight room was that I was 6’9″ and 175 pounds coming out of high school, and I stayed skinny through most of college. I wasn’t strong, and I was embarrassed that I couldn’t lift as heavy as the other guys, so I just didn’t want to be seen in there. Even early in my NBA career I didn’t take strength training seriously — partly because of the myths going around at the time, that lifting would take away from your jump shot or mess with your game. Nobody was telling me that strength training actually helps prevent injuries and makes you faster. It wasn’t until the middle of my career that I started taking strength training more seriously.
You’ve mentioned that strength training eventually helped you “walk normally again.” What was going on with your body?
I’d been playing sports since I was a kid — baseball, football, basketball — a lot of miles on my knees. There was a stretch of about 10 summers in a row where I had some kind of surgery after the season ended: knee, wrist, broken nose, something. I’ve had four wrist surgeries, two on each side, and I just had my fifth knee surgery this past May. When I say “walk normally,” I mean there were stretches where I couldn’t just hop out of bed — I had to ease to the side, stretch my back and knees before I could even stand up. Rebuilding strength around my knees and legs is what got me back to actually walking correctly, and even playing a little pickup basketball again.
When did you actually start taking strength training seriously?
Probably around my seventh or eighth year in the league, after I got traded and saw teammates who took their strength training seriously. That’s when it clicked for me.
Looking back, do you think taking strength training seriously earlier would have kept you healthier?
Definitely. I only played one or two full, uninterrupted seasons in my whole career. I pulled my hamstrings constantly, pulled my groin constantly, and a lot of that came down to not having strong stabilizing muscles — core strength, things like that. And on top of the lifting piece, I was never a stretcher. I never took care of my body that way. If I’d taken both of those seriously earlier, I think my career looks different.
What would you tell someone who avoids the gym because they feel like they’re bad at it — the way you did?
Worry about you, not about what the person next to you is lifting. I was skinny, but I found out I was actually strong underneath it — “wiry strong,” I guess you’d call it. You don’t realize you’re getting stronger until you actually test it. A few months ago we PR’d back squat and I hit close to 400 pounds. I had never squatted over 300 in my life, and that’s on bad knees. I remember walking into CrossFit for the first time and seeing a woman lifting more than me and thinking, that’s not for me, I can’t do that — and then just working at it until I could do more than I thought. Strength training works, and everyone can do it.
We don’t talk about it enough, but women get discouraged from strength training constantly — and it shows up in injury numbers.
It’s a real problem. Female athletes tear their ACLs at a significantly higher rate than male athletes — research puts it anywhere from two to eight times higher depending on the sport, and NCAA data shows roughly three times the rate in collegiate athletes. Part of that is anatomy, but a big part of it is that girls and women have historically been steered away from strength training. If you’re not building strength around a joint, you’re not stabilizing it, and that shows up on the field.
As a coach now, how different is strength and conditioning from when you played?
Night and day. When I played, you got a monthly lift quota and mostly did it on your own — if it was a home-heavy month, maybe 10 lifts; a road-heavy month, six. Guys like me would knock five out in the first week just to get it over with. Here with the Swarm, guys lift four or five times a week, some before practice, some after, in small groups because our weight room is small. The recovery tools are completely different too — we had an ice bag and a cooler back then. Now every player gets a take-home ice machine for after games, and a lot of gyms have anti-gravity or underwater treadmills that take load off your knees while you’re still running. It’s a completely different level of investment in keeping guys healthy.
Recovery science itself has shifted a lot too — even the old “ice everything” approach is being questioned.
That’s true, and it’s still an evolving field. There’s research going both directions on things like cold water immersion. What’s changing fastest is the rehab philosophy — the old RICE model (rest, ice, compress, elevate) is being replaced with “get moving as soon as you safely can.” Even the recovery gear reflects that shift. And Donyell’s own recent knee surgery is a good example: this time, they took him straight into a rehab room and had him working on stairs the same day, no crutches from day one. Compare that to his first few knee surgeries in his 20s, where he had all summer to rest before training camp — the whole approach to getting back on your feet has changed.
You mentioned still fighting the urge to overdo it when you fall off a routine — punishing yourself with a big session instead of easing back in.
Guilty. If I miss a couple weeks, I want to go run six miles even though I haven’t run in two years, and then I’m sore for three weeks and can’t run again. It’s something I still catch myself doing.
That’s actually one of the most common training mistakes we see — treating a missed week as something to punish yourself for.
It is, and it’s good to hear a former pro athlete and G League coach say it out loud, because it tells everyone else they’re not alone in that pattern. Recovery is part of the training, not a break from it — how you recover from a session is what lets your body actually adapt to it. Doing more isn’t the fix. Finding a program and a training environment you’ll actually stick with is what keeps you consistent enough to see the benefit in the first place.
Donyell Marshall played 15 seasons in the NBA after a record-setting career at UConn, and is now an assistant coach with the Greensboro Swarm, the Charlotte Hornets’ G League affiliate.
Erik Castiglione is the owner and head coach of Viking Athletics in West Hartford, CT. If you want to build strength that keeps you in the game — whatever your game is — reach out to Coach Erik at Viking Athletics.