Lake Oswego’s Championship Season Anchored by Strength Coach No Stranger to Success

Lake Oswego High School capping off their second straight title game appearance by hoisting the OSAA 6A State Championship trophy. Posted by @LOLakersFB on X/Twitter.

This past December 2025, Lake Oswego High School’s football team capped off a dominating playoff run en route to the school’s 3rd state title under head coach Steve Coury with a 35-6 victory over Central Catholic.  The Lakers finished the season outscoring their opponents 199-23 over the last 6 games of the season, fueled in part by MaxPreps Oregon High School Football Player of the Year, and Utah Utes commit LaMarcus Bell, not to mention a string of all-state and all-league players.

That level of dominance is rarely seen in Oregon high school football’s top classification; only a handful of champions over the past several decades have finished the season on a run comparable to Lake Oswego’s.  The Oregonian created a list of the top 25 most dominant teams in Oregon HS football history in 2016.  This list needs updating to account for a few teams since then, with this year’s champion no doubt in the conversation.   

Specific coaches of teams on that list stand out: Steve Coury, Ken Potter, Steve Pyne, Chris Miller, and from more recent years Jon Eagle.  Longevity at a prominent program is a badge of honor. Still, involvement across multiple programs- or with large groups of players from that list- is impressive in its own right.  

Revisiting the list years later, something stood out: several teams that made the cut have one person in common, whether in an official capacity for the whole team or as someone who worked with large portions of the team year-round.  That coach is current Lake Oswego High School football strength and conditioning coach Mark McLaughlin.

I’ve known Mark since 2003; after all I happen to be the very first athlete he trained in his well known Performance Training Center facility formerly based in Milwaukie and Beaverton.  Parents and coaches from the Portland region may have heard of McLaughlin, a native Oregonian who, before his career in sports performance took off, was a multi-sport athlete at La Salle High School in Milwaukie in the 1980s, starring in basketball under legendary coach Jack Cleghorn.  McLaughlin started his current role with Lake Oswego five years ago, and he’s trained thousands of athletes over the past 25 years. 

After a pandemic-forced a career shift out of the sports tech field, McLaughlin decided to reopen his famous Performance Training Center services as a consultancy.  Shortly after announcing his return on social media, a former athlete of Mark’s and Lake Oswego High School alumni Stevie Coury reached out to see if he would be interested in working with the football team in an official capacity.

“I told him I’d have to think about it, and he was persistent,” McLaughlin remembers, “I ended up meeting with Stevie’s dad Coach Steve Coury where he outlined what was important to him, and he shared how he thought I could make an impact.”

He initially thought he would just write a strength and conditioning program and the team would implement it, but by the time he got back home from that initial conversation he knew it needed to be all or nothing.  A weight-room attendant job happened to open up in the district.  He applied for it and was hired, making the engagement official.

By this time, McLaughlin had trained thousands of athletes from junior high, high school, all levels of college, professional, Olympic, special operators, federal agents, as well as a few couch potatoes.  The first few weeks on the job McLaughlin admits he had a small case of impostor syndrome, but his focus on the mission and passion for training athletes enabled him to hit the ground running.  

“I toured the facilities before any athletes showed up, and in the first session we had 30 or 40 kids.” McLaughlin remembers, “I wanted to see how they acted. What was their work ethic like?  They were just coming off the pandemic- what are their physical preparation levels at?  How are they going to respond to a totally different training philosophy?”

The strength and conditioning program stayed very basic initially, and purposefully so.  McLaughlin wanted to observe exercise technique, body language, and see how the athletes responded when new elements like sprinting and jumping were added in.

A snapshot of Lake Oswego's strength and conditioning program under McLaughlin, seen here preparing for the start of the 2024 football season under Head Coach Steve Coury.

“We were training five days a week, and it wasn’t anything sophisticated, but it was mindfully applied and progressed.  I wanted to get these kids outside as much as possible; they had been stuck inside from COVID for so long, and I strongly believed that they needed that outdoor element back in their lives. It was good to be around people and create an enjoyable environment that they wanted to come back to.” 

Thinking holistically about the athlete may now be a cliche idea, but McLaughlin has long been progressive with interventions for years before most coaches in the field.  The environment he wanted to create to get kids coming back on their own was one of his biggest successes.

“This should be fun.  It’s a sport- it’s a game.  Lots of us grew up playing and having fun, why not make it fun?”  There’s an element lost to many coaches, but McLaughlin knows that part of the team’s success will rely on maximizing participation in their off-season program. “We had probably 40 kids in that first season participate in voluntary workouts.  This year, we had 118 kids show up, voluntarily.”

Numbers like that would make most any high school football coach salivate, especially if it means those kids are training consistently and actually making progress.  McLaughlin has taken a bold approach relying on his own international network of coaches and scientists to craft a program that as he coined the phrase years ago in his business, produced “Results. Period.”

Portions of the off-season gymnastics training that was included in McLaughlin's programming for the Lake Oswego football team.

“One thing that has evolved with this particular program over the years is adding in gymnastics to the training.” McLaughlin has been heavily influenced by some of the early pioneers in human performance training from the old Soviet Union, where athletes received a well rounded general preparation base in generalized activities such as gymnastics as part of their overall development.

“We perform gymnastics skills one or two days a week during parts of the training year, and we had it led by a former gymnast, as well as an acrobatic specialist.”  From a personal standpoint, I’ve seen amazing athletes over the years do some impressive stuff.  Watching McLaughlin’s social media posts and seeing high school linemen do backflips and dunk basketballs is certainly on that list for me.

A glimpse into parts of the Lake Oswego off-season training from the last several years that includes an array of activities like gymnastics, VALD ForceDecks jump testing, Keiser leg-press profiling- and perhaps most importantly- a great time had by the athletes.

“Our all-state linemen are able to do back flips and dunk basketballs on both short and regulation height rims. These guys are tall, they weigh over 240lbs, but they are able to explore and master those movements.  When I pull training concepts from the Russians or any of those older elements, I am thinking of being an athlete first, a ‘beast’ second, and a football player third.” 

The training environment McLaughlin has created reflects those priorities, as he’s made great use of the gymnastics and wrestling equipment, high jump mats, ropes for climbing, in addition to a traditional weight room with great equipment.  It’s not just that he has many tools at his disposal, but rather that he has mindfully crafted a program that uses a thorough, holistic approach to developing resilient athletes.  

In addition to the training, there is the equipment and testing McLaughlin has brought in to understand how each athlete is responding to training.  They have made great use of Keiser resistance training equipment in the form of squat machines, leg presses, and specialized calf-raise where athletes see their performance in real time helping them enhance effort through intention to move fast.

Mark has also had athletes track recovery parameters and general wellness to reinforce their importance as part of progressing their physical performance and health- items that are easily ignored but especially important during this growth window.  The program also deployed use of VALD’s ForceDecks to profile musculoskeletal performance, helping to customize their warm-ups and strength programming protocols even further.  As it turns out, they have a couple off-the-charts players based on VALD’s normative database.

McLaughlin has implemented player monitoring and assessment initiatives on-par and even surpassing Division-1 football programs. Pictured here is the VALD ForceDecks technology, used to profile athlete performance outputs helping inform exercise selections, reinforce progress, and highlight areas for continued individual improvement.

Perhaps their biggest revelation through all Mark’s work came through their use of PlayerData GPS during the 2024 season.  The program trialed GPS tracking on key players over a two-week observation period, and there were immediate takeaways for Mark and the staff.

“We really didn’t have great information on how our practice volume and intensity stacked up before using GPS.” McLaughlin remembers.  “But the biggest thing we saw right away with the GPS data was our pregame warm-ups had key guys doing a ton of work crammed in before the game even started.  I reviewed the data, spoke with our coaching staff, but also reached out to colleagues in the NFL and at the college level to get better context and insight on this.”

McLaughlin never hesitates to share notes on training and emphasizes that assessments are a cornerstone to really understanding not just demands of the game, but how an individual athlete is responding to them.

McLaughlin’s network is expansive having worked in the industry all these years, so being able to send quick text messages to people like Seattle Seahawks Director of Research and Analytics  Patrick Ward for feedback isn’t an uncommon practice for him.

While workloads for a specific athlete at a particular school will vary, McLaughlin identified starters for Lake Oswego who were completing the equivalent of an entire ‘normal” practice worth of running and sprinting in the 60-minutes before their game even started.  That first GPS finding led to a near-immediate intervention in partnership with Coach Coury and the staff: trim down the pregame warm-up.  Coury and staff didn’t hesitate.    

I’ll add a bit of context here: having worked in professional soccer myself as a sport scientist and performance coach I know what some normal workload ranges look like for a “pro” who plays the entire 90+ minutes of a match plus warm ups.  Lake Oswego, as well as I assume countless other programs across the country, regularly have high school football players covering more distance and doing more running and sprinting than professional athletes in a game in an “aerobic” sport like soccer.

That topic could- and likely will- be an article of its own.

The insights weren’t wasted, and Coach Coury and the staff trimmed down their pre-game warm ups to improve the freshness of the players for the actual game.  Beyond the warm up, McLaughlin focused on key workloads of running, sprinting, accelerations, decelerations, and total distances athletes endured during the actual games.  He evaluated what specific positions achieved, and what was expected of one-way or two-way players in their system.

“It’s not about wasting time doing mindless conditioning or training just for the sake of activity. It’s important to understand the actual demands of the game and focus on training the physical qualities and capacities that allow for them to display those traits repeatedly and at a high quality.”  

Defining game demands in context to player-specific roles and positions has continued to fuel Mark's passion for developing the whole athlete, and not just the shiny traits alone.

Mark adds “There are no silver bullet solutions; you have to develop many traits within the athlete beyond just the flashy items like speed.  We didn’t outscore opponents 199 to 23 in the toughest stretch of the season by just being fast, we did it, in part, by being well-trained, resilient, durable, and robust for all 4-quarters of the game.”  

Lake Oswego’s resiliency is a team effort, where McLaughlin and the school’s athletic trainer Dom Lee operate in coordination with each other as opposed to staying siloed when handling the health and performance of the players.  The pair have worked together to reduce the total number of injuries, and are constantly evaluating best-practices for the team.

One item that shouldn’t be lost on those who follow high school football in the region is that Lake Oswego’s success from the 2024 season and continued run during the 2025 campaign had their seeds sown back in Mark’s early days with Lake Oswego.

“Last year’s (class of 2025) seniors were the first class to complete all four years within our strength and conditioning program.  It makes a huge difference to have year after year of high quality, enjoyable work.  When you combine that work with the window of growth and development they are naturally going through, there is definitely a ‘boom’.  You start to see these really impressive physical performances that are paired with durability, and last year in the Fall of 2024 is when we really saw it pop for the first time.”

McLaughlin has expanded to work with some 7th and 8th graders in the district, meaning Lake Oswego will soon have players in their system having five to six years of this comprehensive approach in their program.

Seeing the work unfolding the last several years at Lake Oswego got me back to thinking about that list of all-time great high school football teams here in Oregon, and how Mark has had his fingerprints on big groups of players from that list that trained extensively with him- not as a ‘drop-in and workout’ situation, but under his long-term programming and guidance.

The 2011 Lake Oswego team that ranked #19 on the list had a number of starters, including first-team all state wide-receiver and Oregon State University signee Stevie Coury, who achieved a laser-time 4.39 40-yd dash, training year-round with McLaughlin.

Few people following Oregon high school football will forget the dominance of the 2006 Jesuit team, anchored by 10+ D-1 recruits with players like Offensive Player of the Year Paul Weatheroy and Defensive Player of the Year Owen Marecic- many of whom also trained year round with McLaughlin.  Prior to making it to the NFL, Marecic would be a two-way starter for Jim Harbaugh at Stanford, who labeled Marecic as “the perfect football player.”  

A portion of the list of athletes who trained consistently with Mark also include standout recruit, Offensive Player of the year and Oregon signee Colt Lyerla, Offensive Player of the Year Steven Long, Jesuit/Oregon State and longtime NFL linemen Mike Remmers, Western Oregon alum and Super Bowl Champion Kevin Boss, and another Offensive Player of the Year- Utah Ute signee LaMarcus Bell… to name a few.

Utah-commit LaMarcus Bell joins the list of numerous 'Player of the Year' winners McLaughlin has trained over the years throughout Oregon.

When I pressed Mark a little on secrets to his own success, he turned the tables on me a bit.

“Those kids work their asses off. I just designed the environment for them to learn and guide them. We're just kind of working on this thing together as our common goal. They had to show up and do the work. It doesn't matter how good my program is.”

Mark finished with a drive home point that might get lost on some parents, coaches and skill trainers: “If they don't want to be there for their own reasons it's not going to matter. I hope that's a point that is well received.”

Something that stood out to me is Mark’s philosophical approach, and how it has evolved over the years.  He is very familiar with youth sports throughout the region, and has seen a rinse and repeat approach that puts business needs ahead of the athlete.

“I’d love to see more coaches put their hands up and attempt to put the program more in the hands of their players- to really make it theirs.  When I go to conferences or clinics I hear coaches chasing what drills to do- but you can’t copy and paste this stuff.  What about how kids learn?  What about creating an environment that fosters active learning?  I think if coaches spent more time learning about how kids actually learn, they would have better buy-in within their program and would have a program of problem-solvers.”

For those who have come across Mark on social media (Mark McLaughlin @Results_Period on X/Twitter, and @MarkPTC on Instagram), you’ll see someone not afraid to speak up on behalf of athletes, as well as someone who puts science into practice on a daily basis who is willing-and wanting to share his work and his sources.

“Look at rival sporting countries like Norway and Sweden, who are strong rivals in winter sports, yet they regularly have coaches who share information and study with each other.  The information they share with each other isn’t just helping them, it’s also helped foster higher levels of competition.

Mark paused but shared, “Things in the United States with youth sports, for some reason, are much more ego driven and the business of sports is too often taking precedence over what's best for the athlete. Everyone feels they have the secret to winning, but so often it’s actually just coaches copying and pasting whatever they saw online from a skill guru or from a blue chip CFP University posting practice drills.”

It’s clear that Mark has a deep passion, and perhaps that's been his secret sauce all along.  But something that resonated is his attitude towards his profession.  “I consider myself a professional in coaching.  I’m not a part-time coach, I’m not a teacher and a coach, or a lawyer and a coach- coaching is my profession.”  Mark pauses, then nods with conviction as he finishes with “Yea, maybe it’s in a different way- but that’s my kind of way.”     

I was able to be a fly on the wall for a few of Mark’s sessions at Lake Oswego the last several years, and something I took note of was the passion and enjoyment of those athletes executing something as trivial as a dynamic warm-up, or listening to Mark announcing a special “mission of the week theme” for the team.  The excitement was palpable, and it wasn’t just teenage boys acting their age; it was a group of young men that had great enthusiasm for the task at hand.  As someone who has coached high school football on and off for nearly 20 years, it was something I had rarely seen before.

Flashing back to December 2025 in the State Championship game versus Central Catholic, where Lake Oswego trimmed down their warm-ups to 25 minutes total right before kick-off en-route to a 27-0 lead by halftime and a 35-0 lead before surrendering a last second touchdown en route to winning the state championship.  McLaughlin, no stranger to success in Oregon high school football, would now officially have his own ring as a full-time staff member of Lake Oswego.

I spoke to Mark in December shortly after the victory, and not surprisingly he already had the 2026 off-season planned out. His first priority?

 “I’m making sure the athletes get a good amount of time off again, then we get to get this thing rolling.”