Adrian Briones brings 18 years of experience as a strength and conditioning coach to Farmersville High School. Submitted photo
By David Wolman
When Farmersville head football coach and athletic director Zac Quinlan made a job posting for a full-time strength and conditioning coach earlier this year, one of the friends in his coaching circle sent a text message to Adrian Briones.
Quinlan’s friend told Briones that there was a job opening in the Northeast Dallas area. Briones asked, “Which school?” Quinlan’s friend replied, “Farmersville.” Briones didn’t know where Farmersville was located, but with him being a native of Huntsville, Texas, that gave him more than enough reason to pursue the position.
Despite living 1,600 miles away in California, where he worked as the director of sport performance at California State University, Northridge, Briones was intrigued by the possibility of working in the state where he was born. He came to Farmersville to interview and has now been on the job since May.
“I knew when I came here that it was the place for me,” Briones said. “I knew it in my heart that this is where God wanted me and my family to be. It was one of the best decisions in my life.”
Briones was told on his interview that Farmersville never had a full-time strength and conditioning coach on its staff. Last season, assistant football coach and boys head powerlifting coach Christopher Anderson was in charge of the strength and conditioning program. Quinlan praised Anderson for his efforts and how hard he worked to train the athletes. But as the end of last school year neared its end, Quinlan wanted to hire someone full time – not just for football, but for all sports – and he told everyone that he interviewed that whoever he hired that it would be a “game-changer” for the program.
The human aspect is what ultimately sold Quinlan on Briones.
“He is great at building relationships, and that was part of the reason that I wanted to hire him,” Quinlan said. “He came highly recommended by a bunch of guys that I knew in the business. That part of it made it easy for us.”
This is Briones’ first job at the high school level after spending the past 18 years at the collegiate level.
Briones began his career as a student strength and conditioning coach at Belhaven University in May 2006 and went to coach at several NCAA Division I schools, including the United States Air Force Academy, Tennessee and Delaware State.
The biggest break of his career came in 2021 when he was hired as a full-time assistant football sport performance coach at the University of Southern California. He spent the next two years in the same role at UCLA and was named the director of sport performance at California State University, Northridge in 2024.
“When I got to USC, I was happy and excited,” he said. “I got to the point where I knew that I had made it big time.”
Briones had fulfilled his goal of being a full-time strength and conditioning coach at a “Power 5” college and was hopeful that he could one day land a similar job with a major professional sports team, preferably with his favorite NFL team: the Dallas Cowboys.
However, Briones was quick to find out how much that college athletics have become “the definition of a true business”, especially since the NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) officially came into being in mid-2021, the official launch of the NCAA transfer portal on Oct. 15, 2018, and pressure by mega donors for the teams that they support to perform well.
The transfer portal made it tough for Briones to build relationships.
“I believe that everything is about relationships, but college sports is a production-based industry,” he said. “If the team doesn’t win, you get fired. That’s not for just the head coach, but for the strength and conditioning coach as well. Every day is an interview. There is no room for error.”
The demand of the job also forced Briones to miss out on family time.
“There was no family time,” he said. “But ever since I’ve been here, I still get to have family time while still getting to do what I love the most.”
When Briones met the student-athletes at Farmersville for the first time, the first thing that he told them was how he wanted to “Put God first.” He told them that weight lifting is not about numbers or achieving maxes, but more so about handling adversity and having faith in themselves when things don’t go their way. Of course, Briones made sure that his vision aligned with that of Quinlan, which is about culture and putting the team before the individual.
“We have this thing called ‘Tough Tuesday,’” Briones said. “If we wait until adversity happens, there is a 50/50 chance that you’re not going to succeed. It’s brutal, but they’ve learned it’s just as much mental as it is physical.”
Farmersville head volleyball coach Arian May has been impressed with how well that Briones has trained her players.
“He’s a great person who seems to really care about the girls, and I think that he has gotten them to buy in because of how much he cares about them,” May said.
Briones is happy to be back in Texas.
“You go around and see $2.65 for gas, eat Tex-Mex and barbecue,” he said. “This is great. I’m not moving.”
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