{"id":850071,"date":"2026-04-02T21:39:21","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T21:39:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/850071\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T21:39:21","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T21:39:21","slug":"cardinals-promote-kyle-sammons-as-strength-and-conditioning-staff-finalized","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/850071\/","title":{"rendered":"Cardinals Promote Kyle Sammons As Strength And Conditioning Staff Finalized"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The players are coming back to the building next week \u2013 voluntarily, of course \u2013 as the Cardinals begin their offseason program under first-year head coach Mike LaFleur.<\/p>\n<p>They will have a new head strength and conditioning coach to meet them, although he is a familiar face after Kyle Sammons earned the promotion to the lead role.<\/p>\n<p>The Cardinals <a class=\"nfl-o-cta--link nfl-o-cta--underline\" style=\"word-break: break-word\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azcardinals.com\/news\/cardinals-announce-offseason-dates-for-2026\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">start on April 7<\/a> at the Dignity Health Training Center.<\/p>\n<p>Sammons has been with the Cardinals since 2023 as a strength and conditioning assistant and the sports science coordinator.<\/p>\n<p>The Cardinals also kept on Shea Thompson as director, football performance as well as Buddy Morris as senior reconditioning coordinator.<\/p>\n<p>The team made three hires for the department: Matt King and Rich Pruett, both of whom are assistant strength and conditioning coaches, and Aaron Sanchez as assistant strength and conditioning\/reconditioning.<\/p>\n<p>The changes in the department come after the team was &#8220;looking at everything,&#8217; GM Monti Ossenfort said at the Scouting Combine, when it came to player health. The Cardinals suffered <a class=\"nfl-o-cta--link nfl-o-cta--underline\" style=\"word-break: break-word\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azcardinals.com\/news\/cardinals-turned-out-to-be-one-of-most-injured-teams-since-2001\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">more injury impact in 2025<\/a> than any NFL team but one since the 2001 season.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s tough when you acquire players and try to build a team and then for whatever reason they&#8217;re not out there,&#8221; Ossenfort said. &#8220;There are two things that suck about life in the NFL, and that&#8217;s injuries and losing. Unfortunately, we suffered a lot of both last year.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We have to find a way to overcome that, we have to find a better way to take care of them, to train them, so they can remain on the field. That has been a huge emphasis.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The Cardinals get a head start on the offseason work by two weeks because it is LaFleur&#8217;s first season. But the conversations about roster health have been constant since LaFleur arrived and that won&#8217;t change.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;There are plenty of guys probably getting that question right now (among NFL coaches.),&#8221; LaFleur said. &#8220;We have a process that we will go about in terms of how we feel will help these guys get prepared.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Some of it is, are they overtraining? Are they undertraining? Where is that fine balance? Are they getting enough competitive work? Is a joint practice different than a normal practice, because your juices get pumped up. There are great stats about playing in the preseason, not playing in the preseason. That is a fluid conversation.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The players are coming back to the building next week \u2013 voluntarily, of course \u2013 as the Cardinals&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":850072,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2078],"tags":[375,390,2604,1327,1054,1051,7,1053,1052,88,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-850071","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arizona-cardinals","8":"tag-arizona","9":"tag-arizona-cardinals","10":"tag-arizonacardinals","11":"tag-cardinals","12":"tag-darren-urban","13":"tag-featured-articles","14":"tag-football","15":"tag-home-page-news-headlines","16":"tag-mega-feed","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-nfl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116337283278106692","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=850071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/850072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=850071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=850071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=850071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}