Kennewick grad overcomes hurdles to train young athletes

Kennewick High graduate Jarod Gonzales had always been a big guy.

He weighed 235 pounds and stood 5-feet, 9-inches when he graduated in 2012. He played football and baseball, starting on the diamond.

He could always hit and even had a Division I coach tell him his hitting would translate at that level but that his body type wasn’t one they would recruit.

So, Gonzales headed to Walla Walla Community College on a mission to get into shape.

He dropped to 190 pounds by spring season, was his team’s home run king and suddenly had Oregon State, Texas A&M and others knocking at his door.

The only problem is that the way he achieved his weight loss was unhealthy and bred in him the desire to never gain any weight.

“Everything became trying to achieve the lowest percentage of body fat possible,” said Gonzales, who is the strength and conditioning coach for two Nighthawks athletic programs. “I stopped eating. I was working out three hours a day. By the end of freshman summer, I was down to 165.

“Every school that was contacting me was gone. I went from driving the ball out of the yard to not even getting it to the fence.”

As he struggled with his weight, unhealthy eating habits and punishing workouts, he eventually secured a spot on the Gonzaga baseball team but he ended up at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho, for his senior year.

He played well on the field, while still struggling off it. He’d get up at 1 a.m. and work out before the team hit the road at 5 a.m. He’d work out before practices and games. If you needed to find him, it was likely he was in the gym.

“I cared so much about what people thought of my body that if anything changed, I was super nervous. I was so insecure,” he said. “What people saw I looked like, I didn’t see in the mirror. That fat kid in high school was what I saw. I was never good enough.”

Dark places

After finishing school with a degree in kinesiology with the emphasis on coaching and parks and recreation, he became an assistant baseball coach at NNU. He was eventually was hired at Rock and Armor in Boise, and currently works with the women’s basketball and soccer teams.

Despite having success in his new career, he still was struggling mightily with his health.

After eating an Oreo cookie one time, he went and ran 15 miles to make up for it.

He began forcing himself to throw up if he ate food that sent him over his planned 1,200 calories a day. His relationships with friends and family were suffering and he found himself in a very dark place.

Eventually, Gonzales began seeing a counselor and going to church with NNU athletic trainer Jaime May, which helped him begin to make changes in his approach to life.

“He came and talked to me after something happened in his personal life and we just started talking about faith,” May said. “We started going to Catholic church together and eventually switched to Crossroads (Community Church). Things just kind of developed from there.”

Gonzales had a newfound faith he could rely on and with it some strong bonds, including one with women’s basketball coach Steve Steele, who also attends Crossroads.

“He is a fairly new Christian and being here at NNU was a big influence on his life,” Steele said. “He had to evaluate his life and what his faith means to him and that is when we started having more serious conversations.”

When Gonzales began working with the women’s basketball and soccer teams, there were some concerns about his age, but ultimately the coaching staffs were pleased with the way he went about his workouts with the student-athletes.

Everything has gone smoothly, though, as he has tailored the team workouts for their sports — doing speed and explosive work with the basketball team and major conditioning work with the soccer team.

And through it all he tries to let the athletes know if they are struggling they can come talk to him.

“When he told us it was super surprising,” said women’s soccer player Hailey Hockett. “At that point, we had just a strictly ‘we see you for an hour three times a week’ relationship. There was no vulnerability from us or him. Once he said that, it kind of proved to us that he cared about us and it was not just him getting paid.”

Hockett is one of a handful of local NNU athletes who worked with Gonzales all summer running the stairs at Camel’s Back Park in Boise.

“He is really creative,” Hockett said. “He knows all of our medical histories — so if someone needs to watch their knees or back, he changes the circuit for them.”

He not only has made changes for the student athletes, but also himself.

“You are going to face trials, but you can come out better and happier. The dark places only last for so long.”