Trevor Coston, center, instructs Cony High football members during a July 22 workout session in Augusta. Rich Abrahamson/Morning Sentinel

The optional summer workouts, Cony High junior offensive tackle Bohdy King Jones said, proved to be a revelation.

“I thought I knew how to run and then I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve been lied to my whole life,’ ” he said.

King Jones was a doughy 5-foot-10, 288-pound lineman entering his freshman year at Cony. Two years later, the 6-foot-2 King Jones is 270 pounds and a returning starting lineman. He credits his physical transformation in part to workouts provided by Trevor Coston — a former All-American defensive back at the University of Maine.

For the last three summers, Coston has run Cony’s six-week summer workout sessions, which are open to athletes in all sports.

Coston, 34, the lead trainer at his Aim Performance and Fitness business in Richmond, showed him how to properly center his body while running to efficiently maximize power.

“He’s made me a way, way, way better player,” said King Jones. “He’s definitely changing our team. Not just me but the whole team. … The workouts that he makes us do, they all (translate) to the field. They help with running, putting more power into the ground because most people don’t know how to properly run.”

How Maine high school football teams train in the offseason has evolved over the years, be it the introduction of weight training 40-50 years ago or the advent of seven-on-seven passing camps and competitions. In recent years, some programs are hiring outside sports performance experts to direct their conditioning sessions, which Coston said is common in larger states. Many Maine football teams run their own workout programs.

Leaning on outside help for offseason workouts can come at a cost. At Cony High in Augusta, the athletic boosters foot the $4,000 bill, which covers 24 sessions.

Regardless of who directs the workouts, a greater emphasis is placed on increasing speed, explosiveness and functional strength.

“Most people now have an outside person helping,” said John Wolfgram, who won 309 games and 10 state titles as a Maine high school coach and is president of the Maine chapter of the National Football Foundation. “The thinking is their expertise is strength and conditioning, and a football coach, he’s more of the coach who does the Xs and Os.”

Cony Coach B.L. Lippert said he previously decided to run a school-wide summer conditioning program but acknowledged, “I’m not an expert.”

“Anyone who saw me play knows I don’t know much about sprinting,” he said.

During a two-hour session, Coston oversees cardio fitness exercises outside and the weightlifting portions of Cony’s summer program. This is his second year doing the same for nearby Messalonskee High in Oakland.

After his senior season at Maine, Coston signed as an undrafted free agent with the Chicago Bears and was on their practice squad in 2012. He also had preseason stints with the Detroit Lions, as well as the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League.

David Frye, a Cony High football player, leaps on a box during a July 22 workout session in Augusta. Rich Abrahamson/Morning Sentinel

Coston, who teaches social studies at Cony Middle School, said it was during his first NFL training camp that he really realized true conditioning comes from playing the sport.

“When you say conditioning (to) most people my age, we were running in a straight line. Really it was just getting an athlete tired and calling it conditioning,” Coston said. “What we’re doing is really more of a sports performance thing. One, we teach them how to run. How to change directions. How to produce force. And we put them in some positions that are advantageous and some that aren’t, so they can learn how to get out of that position or deal with that uncomfortable position.”

In the weight room, the days of wearing a belt to dead lift several hundred pounds are over — or at least should be, Coston said.

“When you think about it, sports are mostly played on one leg. So we teach them to squat on a single leg,” Coston said. “We’re not lifting like body builders. We’re lifting to be athletes. You never see a body builder go play sports.”

In southern Maine, MaineHealth Sports Performance has offered similar running, agility and speed-focused sessions while leaving weight training to coaching staffs for the past 10 years.

Stan Skolfield, owner of Skolfield Sports Performance in Saco, has provided summer speed and conditioning programs for high school football, soccer and field hockey teams for 12 years.

MaineHealth Sports Perfomance conducts free twice-weekly conditioning workouts at two locations, each able to accommodate up to 125 students. Thornton Academy, Biddeford and Old Orchard Beach students meet at Thornton in Saco on Mondays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays and Fridays, Massabesic and Wells students go to Sanford High for the same 75-minute program. MaineHealth has Sports Performance facilities in Saco and Sanford, and contracts with those schools to provide athletic training services. There is no cost to the schools for the summer program.

“It’s been a long-standing thing, a way to give back to the communities we serve,” said Rick Sirois, the manager of MaineHealth Sports Performance.

Joey Curit, a certified strength and conditioning specialist, runs the Saco sessions. Curit, 25, played high school and college football at Biddeford and the University of New England.

“Everything’s on the field there at (Thornton) and then at Sanford,” he said. “We have athletes from a bunch of different sports and a bunch of different schools. It’s pretty similar for all the sports, but we have between five and six groups based on skill and age level.”

Bohdy King Jones, 15, a member of the Cony High School football team, powers through squats during a July 22 workout session in Augusta. Rich Abrahamson/Morning Sentinel

An outside specialist is trained to offer a “structured program, understanding how much they need to do in terms of volume and what order they need to do it in,” Curit said.

Skolfield Sports Performances’ summer speed and conditioning programs cost roughly $12-15 per athlete per session. Sometimes that cost is covered by a school booster group, sometimes by the participants. Skolfield said he’s seen more growth with soccer and field hockey than football.

“With football, more coaches tend to run their own programming all summer,” Skolfield said. “Football is the one we attract the least amount of summer athletes just because the coaches are so involved and more hands-on.”

Skolfield said the primary purpose of his eight-week workout plan, leading into the start of fall practice, is to reduce injuries when the actual practices begin.

“The benefit is those kids are going to arrive in preseason already in shape, and you spend less time with injuries like shin splints, quad strains and the ticky-tack injuries that can be really detrimental to a team,” Skolfield said. “The coach can spend less time having to get them in shape (and) can spend more time on strategy and skills of the sport.”

As Skolfield noted, many high school football coaches choose to be their program’s lead summer-time instructor, with assistance from their staff.

But coaches have also evolved their training. Improving sport-specific strength, flexibility and speed is what matters now, not weight-room warriors with bulging biceps, said Bonny Eagle Coach Kevin Cooper, who’s won seven Class A titles in 26 years.

“One of the big things we emphasize more now than when I first started is to try to improve on speed development. We want them to run faster. Even the big guys because I just think that type of training will stimulate growth in other areas,” Cooper said. “I’m not sure I did that even a decade ago. Now we try to do something speed-development wise every single workout.”

Cooper said it’s drastically different than what he remembers as a high school player at Lawrence in Fairfield in the 1980s.

“When I was a high school player, I don’t know if there was that much science applied,” Cooper said. “We were picking up heavy things and putting them down.”

Keith Noel, who led Kennebunk to the Class B championship in 2023, also runs his team’s summer conditioning. Many of his players, like those at other southern Maine schools, also benefit from having easy access to gyms for personal training.

“So we have kids who are following our programs but working out in different gyms as well,” he said. “In our team workouts, we have a lot of competition-like agility drills to emphasize not only competition but also things to increase mobility and agility … different sport-specific movements while also competing.”

Thornton Academy football coach Kevin Kezal, who’s won six Class A titles in 25 years, runs the team’s weight-room workouts with his staff. He likes that his players are getting a hybrid approach, and the benefit of working with certified strength and conditioning specialists like Curit.

“It’s great having those guys work with our athletes. They’re trained for that. They know exactly what they’re doing,” Kezal said. “I’m able to go up there on Monday and Thursday mornings, and just watch.”

Kezal, Lippert, Curit and Coston each said there is also value in simply introducing a new voice, one with credentials and experience, to explain to players why they are doing an exercise, its value, and how it will help them.

One key value of any summer workout program really hasn’t changed. As Sirois put it, “doing something, that’s better than nothing.” And when a great percentage of a team does the training together, it builds team unity and confidence.

“The kids that come in the summer, one thing that’s the same, they really want to get better. They make a commitment to improvement,” Cooper said. “You see the same things as when I was a player and first started as a head coach. When they think this is a path to get them better and the team better, they’ll put in the work and it’s really awesome to see.”