UAB Assistant Head Coach Lyle Henley Reflects On New Role With Blazers

By Steve Irvine

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA - February 23, 2025

His job title added an important new distinction to what Lyle Henley has done for the UAB football program for 10 years. In some ways, though, it will be business as usual for Henley, who established himself as one of the top strength and conditioning coaches in college football.

Last week, UAB head coach Trent Dilfer announced that Henley was promoted to the program’s assistant head coach while also retaining his role as the director of sports performance. It was a move that began with a conversation soon after Dilfer took over the program in December of 2022.

“It's something that Coach Dilfer presented to me,” said Henley, who played linebacker and tight end at Louisiana Tech from 1994-99. “It's kind of came out of nowhere. It's not something that you think about really, there's not a lot of strength conditioning coaches in that role. I can only think of one other guy that had that title. Actually the first time I sat down with Trent, he said, ‘Hey, if this relationship evolves over time, then I would consider you’d be in the assistant head coach role. This was before I was hired. Sure enough, true to his word, two years later, he's like ‘Hey, I think that we're, we're at the point to where I'd like to, you know, see you move into this role as, as addition to what you're doing right now.’”

The other strength coach that had a similar role, Henley said, was Dom Studzinski, who served under Hugh Freeze at Liberty and is now with him at Auburn. Studzinski was the Liberty associate head coach before Freeze left for Auburn. Henley said he’s had conversations with Studzinski on how he handled the role.  

“Right now, it's just continuing to do a lot of the things that we've been doing, right,” Henley said. “I guess the expanded role would be getting more involved in some of the other decision-making throughout the program. It’s going to evolve as we go. I don't know what that really is going to look like moving into the season, you know, something like that. But I would think that just really pouring gasoline on the situation and what we're doing, just elevating everything that we've been doing and taking it to another level.”

Bill Clark brought Henley to Birmingham as the program’s strength and conditioning coach in 2016. He was an important part of the process of the Blazers’ return to football. He was also an important part of one of the most unique journeys in college football history.

“Very challenging,” Henley said of his early days at UAB. “Just every day it was, how do we get this done? It was so much thinking outside of the box. Number one it had never been done before, so you didn't have somebody to call and ask what to do. And that's a lot of what coaching is, it's a lot of plagiarism. It's a lot of, hey, what did y'all do in this situation? There was none of that, we had no handbook to go by, so it was daily bouncing the ideas off each other. How do we get this done? How do we do this with limited facilities, limited resources, players that were showing up day-to-day to day that you didn't know anything about them? It was like we kind of took who you could get. But with the leadership of Coach Clark and you knew where you wanted to be. We always broke it down on champs. It was kind of just a wild dream back then. You envisioned yourself like, what if we could really do that someday? And then we did.”

Henley was an important piece of teams that won three consecutive Conference USA West championships, a pair of C-USA championships, captured the school’s first bowl win in 2018 and claimed two more bowl victories. When it came to an end, following the 2022 season, Henley had the option to move on or stick with the program under Dilfer.

“I take this job very personal, you know what I mean?” Henley said. “This program was built from the ground up. That's something that appealed to me when I first took the job. We had a vision for where we wanted to go with it. We felt like we started progressing on that rapidly, right. So, it's personal for me to see that we have not moved in the direction where we have been in the last two years. The program has not moved in the direction we wanted to. It's very personal to me to get this thing back on track. The university has been great. My kids consider Birmingham home. There's so much pride in this program. Talking to the players, it's good to hear from all those guys when they announced this (assistant head coach) thing about how do we get this thing back on track? It means a lot.”