New strength coach George Greene praised for impact on UMass football roster

When Joe Harasymiak took over as UMass football’s head coach this past winter, one of his first priorities was to improve the size and strength of the roster.

While it may sound like a simple objective, just about every other program is eyeing the same thing when targeting recruits and/or transfers so Harasymiak helped his cause by hiring new sports performance coach George Greene.

After nine seasons at Stony Brook, Greene joins the UMass football staff and his efforts are already being praised just a week into the 2025 season.

“Coach Greene, our strength coach, he has done an amazing job getting us in the best shape as possible going into camp,” Minuteman wide receiver T.Y. Harding said. “I don’t want to put an exact number on it, but it was a lot of guys in the 21 miles-an-hour group, way different from winter and spring. You see it right now. All the work we put in over the summer with Coach Greene is starting to show, which is really big.”

From supervising sessions in the weight room to mapping out meal plans for the entire team, Greene is responsible for essentially every aspect of improvement away from the gridiron. Harasymiak noted that UMass’ revamped nutrition regimen, in particular, has been a vital and necessary adjustment.

“A lot of that also comes to the nutrition changes that we’ve made here,” Harasymiak said. “Credit to the administration and all those people that allowed us to go ahead and do that. They were eating on their own here. They were going out to campus to eat. That’s just not Division I football. So now we have meals in here every day and it just shows you, when you invest in something and you see the results.”

With that being said, Harasymiak knows UMass is just scratching the surface regarding his desired physical makeup of the squad.

“If you go in the weight room for one day and you look yourself in the mirror, there’s no change,” Harasymiak said. “A lot of people at that point, week one, day one, they give up because they want immediate results. That’s just not how life works. From that standpoint, we’ve actually talked about how the weight room is just like your abilities as a player. Day one, you probably won’t notice it a lot, but since February 1st, whenever that date is that we started, there’s a lot of change.

“The speeds are probably the thing I’m impressed with the most, just from the data that we get” Harasymiak continued. “But ultimately, what Coach Greene has done over the summer has been really impressive. He’s the mechanic, right, your body is your car. He’s the mechanic and take care of your body.”

Greene is no stranger to the Pioneer Valley as he graduated from Springfield College in 2008 with a bachelor’s degree in applied exercise science, then worked at UMass, first as an strength and conditioning assistant before becoming the Assistant Director of Strength and Conditioning in 2010, a position he held until 2014.

“I think the strength staff and all of our coaches did a great job getting us ready,” Minuteman linebacker Timmy Hinspeter said.

Jeff Stern and Ibn Foster work with Greene as assistant strength coaches for the Minutemen.