By Mike London
mike.london@salisburypost.com

BOONE — It was 1984, it was winter in Boone, and like every Boone winter, it was really cold.

Chip Sigmon, a 1974 A.L. Brown  graduate, was freezing. His “home” at Appalachian State University was the tiny room under Owens Field House where officials dressed on game day. Sigmon was blessed with a bed and a shower, but that was the end of the amenities.

He had no heat.

Some nights he added hunger to his list of miseries. He wasn’t being paid in 1984 — other than room and board — so if he worked late and missed the free training table, he didn’t eat.

But this is a happy story, not a dreary one. Nearly 40 years later, on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023, Appalachian State athletics honored Sigmon. They put a plaque up in the new training facility, acknowledging Sigmon’s enormous sacrifices and contributions as the school’s first strength and conditioning coach.

If you’re one of the thousands who have celebrated App State’s football achievements and successes in many sports, you can trace a lot of the good times back to Sigmon.

Sigmon grew up incredibly fast and superhero strong in Kannapolis in the 1960s.

He was driven to succeed in sports.

His father was a tough man who had fought in World War II, but his dad was on the small side, and Sigmon understood heredity. He realized he wouldn’t have ideal height and size for athletics. So he pushed himself  hard. He lifted weights religiously before most people knew what a barbell was. He read manuals on strength training. He knew there were 600 muscles in the human body and he knew by the time he was 10 that the stronger a muscle is, the faster it is.

He ate vegetables, fruit and lean meat, drank milk and water. While he was still in elementary school, he understood how to exercise, how to train, how to eat.

By the time he was 12, he had muscular development far beyond his peers. He may have been the greatest 7th-grade running back ever. He dominated.

He stopped growing at 5-foot-8. When he arrived at A.L. Brown High, he still stood out athletically because of his speed, but a lot of people had grown bigger.

He melted stop watches in track and field, burning up the track in the 100, 220 and 440. The distances were still yards, not meters, in those days.

In football, the Wonder had no shortage of running backs, so they put Sigmon on defense. He was pure muscle, but he weighed about 150 pounds. He played cornerback. His senior year (the fall of 1973), the Wonders went 7-2-1, the best season they’d had since 1966.

He earned a scholarship and played two more years of defensive back at Lees-McRae, when it was still a junior college. He destroyed some unfortunate opponents as he roared down the field on special teams, but that was it for his playing career.

He devoted the time that had once gone into football into weightlifting and bodybuilding. Understanding the importance of a college degree, he transferred to App State to get a P.E. degree. Exercise Science degrees weren’t an option yet.

Sigmon won bodybuilding championships while he was still an App State student. He was Mr. Mountaineer and Mr. North Carolina in 1977 while he was a junior.

App State baseball coach Jim Morris heard about the extraordinary bodybuilder on his campus, and started thinking outside the box. Weights weren’t recommended for baseball players in those days, but Morris had the notion in his head that stronger players might be better players. He called Sigmon and asked if he would consider setting up an off-season strength program for the baseball team.

The equipment available was primitive, but Sigmon achieved tangible results. The Mountaineers got stronger. They got more explosive. There was a major increase in offense. Their home run totals soared.

That was Sigmon’s first break and a turning point in his life because now he knew what he wanted to do as far as a career. Helping athletes get bigger, stronger and faster would become his life’s work. The phrase “strength and conditioning” wasn’t really a thing yet, but Sigmon was on the right path. Now he just had to figure out how to make a living doing what he loved doing.

He graduated from ASU in 1978, a year in which he won the Mr. Southeast USA body building contest. He returned to his roots in Kannapolis where he was an assistant football coach at A.L. Brown, the track coach at the junior high and a roving P.E. instructor for the elementary schools. He helped A.L. Brown head coach Bob Boswell get a weightlifting program rolling that would translate to enormous success on the football field.

By 1981, the world of strength and conditioning had made serious advancements, and Sigmon heard UNC was looking for an assistant coach in that field.

Sigmon applied, got an interview and got hired.

He worked with all of UNC’s sports teams in the basement of Woolen Gym. The only equipment available was Nautilus machines and free weights. Sigmon had a role in putting extra muscle on basketball athletes such as James Worthy and Michael Jordan.

By the summer of 1983, Sigmon knew he was prepared to head a strength and conditioning program of his own. He called Coach Morris at App State to see if the Mountaineers were ready to make strength & conditioning a full-time position. At that time, App State was still trying to get by with an assistant football coach handling the weight training, but head coach Mack Brown was enough of a visionary to see where the future was.

Sigmon definitely looked the part. He had finished 11th in the 1983 Mr. America competition.

He began his work as App State’s first strength & conditioning coach in January 1984. He would be working with every sports team the university had and he had no assistants. He also had no salary – just room and board — that small room (100 square feet) where the officials dressed.

So he froze and starved for a while. Assistant AD Rachel Laney finally brought him a small electric heater that got him through that first winter.

Sigmon’s gym at App State — the basement of Brooke-Kirk Gym — was 800 square feet, with no windows. He had no office. There was no music, just dumbbells, incline benches and squat racks.

Coach Brown’s first complaint to Sigmon was about hamstring pulls, so Sigmon made calls to friends until he was able to get two leg curl machines donated.

Next came the stereo system.

Sigmon had to conduct winter conditioning drills for the App State football team on hard concrete, on the balcony of the basketball gym.

But App State teams showed enough gains that Sigmon got a salary his second year on the job. Every varsity coach extracted money from of his or her budget to help pay Sigmon enough to make a living.

He earned every dollar. Most days he was in the weight room from before the sun came up until after it went down. Except for eating, he rarely saw daylight.

By his third year, his position was viewed as essential to the university and the state paid him an annual salary — a whopping $21,000. But after a year of working for free, that was like a million dollars to Sigmon. He couldn’t stop smiling.

Great progress was being made. Now there were exercise science majors at App State. They became his assistants. Now he had a team.

Sigmon learned things from all the football coaches he worked with — Brown, Sparky Woods and Jerry Moore. Sigmon also had super supporters in track coach John Weaver and basketball coach Tom Apke. Those men helped Sigmon realize that his real job was to teach athletes to be better men and women on and off the field.

Sigmon’s big break, financially, came in 1990 when he became manager of King’s Gym in Charlotte and began working with the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets.

By 1994, he was working full-time for the Hornets. He was the organization’s first full-time strength coach. He designed exercise, conditioning and nutritional programs for all the players and supervised their injury rehabs. He made all the road trips with the team. He also worked with the WNBA’s Charlotte Sting.

While he was with the Hornets, he encountered the first player who was as driven as Michael Jordan had been at UNC. That was Hornets’ center Alonzo Mourning.

When the Hornets left Charlotte for New Orleans, they wanted Sigmon to go with them. He said no. All his contacts were here, and his life was here. His wife and two daughters were here.

By then there were many opportunities for him. He went to work for the next decade as manager of OrthoCarolina Sports Performance.

Today, he has passed normal retirement age, but he still goes at it hard.

He’s his own boss at Sigmon Sports Performance & Executive Personal Training. He still trains athletes, he’s written books and he’s still is in high demand as a speaker. His knowledge and his experience are unmatched. He still brings a sense of urgency to each new day and is determined to learn something new every day.

They got him to come back to Boone on Sept. 16 and hung that plaque in his honor in the new training facility. Dozens of the athletes he trained and the graduate students he worked with came back to see him honored. It was an emotional reunion.

There have been many great days for App State sports over the years.

Sigmon froze, went hungry and went unpaid just to be part of  it back in 1984 — but he’d do it all over again.

Every sacrifice he made was worth it.

And App State is still one of his favorite places on earth.