Earn It Every Day: Bill Burniston on the Journey, Culture and Relationships Behind a Stanley Cup

There probably isn’t a conventional path to becoming a strength and conditioning coach in the NHL.

But Bill Burniston’s path is particularly hard to draw up.

Before becoming Head Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Carolina Hurricanes—and eventually a Stanley Cup champion—Burniston was an athletic trainer, adapted physical education teacher, high school strength coach, private facility owner, performance coach with USA Baseball and, for his first few years around the Hurricanes, a part-time staff member primarily stretching players.

The common thread through all of it wasn’t necessarily hockey.

It was persistence.

“You gotta grind,” Burniston said on the PHPO Podcast. “Nobody owes you anything…you gotta go out and earn what you can get.”

That philosophy shows up throughout his career. It also sounds a lot like the culture that eventually developed in Carolina.

A Different Road to the NHL

Burniston grew up in New Jersey and initially entered the profession through athletic training. He spent years working in a public-school setting, including teaching adapted physical education while covering athletics after school.

Eventually, seeing the same types of injuries over and over began pulling him toward strength and conditioning.

He remembers looking at injured athletes and thinking that some of the problem wasn’t simply injury—it was preparation. Athletes needed to be stronger and better equipped to tolerate what their sports demanded.

That pushed him toward the preventative side of performance and ultimately into the weight room, a philosophy he says still influences him today.

In 2007, Burniston and his family moved from New Jersey to North Carolina without either he or his wife having a job lined up. The move eventually connected him with Dr. Josh Bloom, a relationship Burniston credits with changing the trajectory of his career.

At the time, Burniston was training athletes out of a trailer loaded with equipment while trying to build his own business. Bloom saw a flyer advertising his training services and reached out. That relationship eventually helped create opportunities with both USA Baseball and the Hurricanes. Burniston worked with USA Baseball’s Collegiate National Team from 2013 through 2019.

His opportunity with Carolina started just as modestly.

For roughly three years he came in on non-game days to perform fascial stretching. When the team traveled and injured or non-traveling players remained behind, Burniston began finding other ways to help.

No new title. No request for more money.

He simply saw work that needed to be done and did it.

That eventually turned into a full-time opportunity in 2016 and the head strength and conditioning position in 2017.

Nearly a decade later, that journey ended with Burniston lifting the Stanley Cup.

Culture Takes Time

If there was one theme Burniston returned to throughout the conversation, it was that culture can’t be manufactured overnight.

Carolina’s culture has become one of the organization’s defining characteristics, but Burniston is quick to point out that it took years to reach that point.

Some of the traditions may sound simple from the outside. The Hurricanes have commitment lines in the training area. They use language and symbols designed to reinforce who they want to be. Players and staff share personal stories with the group to better understand one another.

And then there is the cinder block.

For years, players finished workouts by pressing a concrete block overhead.

The idea came from Carolina’s athletic training staff: make the final press of a workout the same weight as the Stanley Cup.

The players weren’t initially told why.

For roughly five years, the block remained part of the routine. Burniston admits that ideas like that can sound corny if they are introduced without substance.

But his point is that they only become meaningful when the organization consistently lives the message behind them.

“If you live it and breathe it and believe it,” he said, “then it comes to life.”

During Carolina’s run to the Stanley Cup Final, Burniston eventually convinced Head Coach Rod Brind’Amour to reveal the meaning of the block.

The players had unknowingly been practicing the motion for years.

Brind’Amour’s message was simple: everything they did had a purpose. Now it was time to go lift the real thing.

Eventually, they did.

Standards Without Losing the People

The Hurricanes’ environment isn’t all seriousness.

Burniston describes a locker room that laughs constantly, and his own personality is a major part of that. Sarcasm, chirping and humor are part of his relationships with players.

But there is still a clear line between having fun and getting to work.

“We laugh, but I’ll tell you what, we work,” he said.

When players cross the commitment line, everybody understands what comes next.

That balance—knowing when to push, when to pull, when to laugh and when to become serious—is part of what Burniston believes makes the environment work.

Those relationships also make accountability easier.

Burniston admits that earlier in his career he was more rigid. Today, he places far more value on communication.

If a player doesn’t feel he has enough in the tank to complete a workout, Burniston wants him to have that conversation rather than simply disappear.

There is room to adjust.

What isn’t negotiable is communication and trust.

“There’s a trust that we all have with one another,” Burniston said. “As long as we communicate, I’m fine with it.”

That trust took time to earn.

Burniston acknowledged that when he first entered an NHL locker room, there were moments when he wondered whether he belonged. He certainly wasn’t chirping established NHL players on day one.

Over time, relationships with the core group changed that.

Now the established players help communicate the culture to newcomers. What once had to be driven heavily by staff has become increasingly player-led.

That may be one of the strongest signs that a culture has actually taken hold.

Alignment From the Top

Burniston repeatedly credited Brind’Amour with creating an environment that allows the performance staff to do its job.

Their relationship works because the two are aligned on the message being delivered to players.

Brind’Amour trains himself, players see his commitment, and Burniston describes having significant freedom to do his job while knowing the head coach supports the standards being communicated inside the gym.

Burniston believes that relationship between the head coach and performance staff is critical.

And their perspectives don’t always originate from the same place.

Burniston shared a story about debating workload with Brind’Amour. The exchange eventually became a joke about their different backgrounds: Brind’Amour had spent decades skating and playing the game, while Burniston had spent decades with his nose in research trying to figure out how to make athletes better.

Different routes.

Same destination.

That willingness to challenge one another while remaining aligned appears to be an important part of the working relationship.

Bringing the Research Back to His Roots

Late in the conversation, Burniston shifted from culture and relationships to his doctoral research.

But the two subjects aren’t as disconnected as they first appear.

His dissertation brought him back to problems he had noticed decades earlier as a high school athletic trainer.

Female soccer players repeatedly came through his athletic training room with overuse problems while often playing simultaneously for club, school and sometimes additional sports.

Years later, he returned to that population with a simple question:

Elite organizations have GPS, heart-rate monitoring and other expensive tools to understand workload. What could be done for youth and high-school athletes without those resources?

Burniston studied whether athlete self-reported measures could provide a practical way to monitor workload without requiring the technology available in professional sports.

One of the most practical challenges was compliance.

Burniston intentionally withheld the information from coaches during the study because he wanted to determine whether athletes would continue completing the surveys organically. Over the eight-week period, overall compliance was around 60 percent.

That opened a larger conversation about a problem familiar to many professional performance staffs as well:

Collecting data is one thing.

Getting athletes to consistently provide useful information—and showing them that the information matters—is another.

It brings the conversation right back to relationships.

The best monitoring system in the world is limited if athletes don’t trust the people interpreting it, don’t understand why it is being collected, or don’t believe anything will happen with the information.

From a High School Weight Room to the Stanley Cup

Perhaps the best way to understand Burniston’s career is through what he chose to do with his day with the Stanley Cup.

He brought it back to New Jersey.

And among the places he visited was the public high school where he had gotten his first opportunity as a strength coach.

He brought the Cup into the weight room and met with the hockey team.

It’s hard to come up with a better full-circle moment.

The path between those two points was anything but direct.

There were years in athletic training. Years teaching. A trailer full of equipment. Private training. USA Baseball. Part-time work stretching NHL players. Taking on responsibilities nobody had officially given him.

Then a full-time job.

Then the head job.

Then years spent trying to build a culture that could withstand an NHL season and, eventually, a playoff run.

And finally, the Stanley Cup.

For coaches trying to climb the professional ladder, Burniston’s story probably has a more useful message than any shortcut could provide.

Keep getting better.

Make yourself useful.

Build relationships.

Do the work that is available before worrying about the title attached to it.

And understand that the things worth building—careers, relationships, culture and championship teams—usually take longer than you think.

As Burniston put it:

Nobody owes you anything.

You have to earn it.