By By Jonathan Raymond, News Staff

In little more than a year, what started out as two ex-Northeastern athletes with a hobby and some free time has blossomed into one of the most successful and growing club teams on campus.
The NU powerlifting team, founded last year by middlers Eli Laipson-Williams and Joseph Cappellino, competed in last month’s Collegiate National Powerlifting Championships in Baton Rouge, La. March 27 to 29, sending eight members of the squad to the competition.
Laipson-Williams and Cappellino, who went to Nationals as the lone members of the team last year, were accompanied by Adam Matson, Luis Gimez, Pat Gorman, Bradley Blaisdell, Matthew Buttimer and Corey Thomas this time around. While Laipson-Williams said they didn’t do very well as a team at the tournament, he said it was a good learning experience, and in quadrupling their representation, they illustrated how far the team has come since its inception.
Laipson-Williams said the team was established when he, a former football player at Northeastern, and Cappellino, a former shot putter for the Huskies track team, were working together in Cabot Gym.
‘We worked for the assistant trainer there, and he has a history with the sport,’ Cappellino said. ‘So basically, we stopped playing sports for the school and got bored, and he put the idea out there for us to start a club team. That’s how it started last year, and we just recruited everybody, talked to people we know, got a team started.’
At Nationals in Colorado last year, Cappellino finished second in the superheavy division, and Laipson-Williams placed 14th in the 198-pound division. Laipson-Williams described powerlifting as a three-exercise sport that incorporates the squat, bench press and dead lift.
‘Basically the way you compete is you have three attempts in each of these exercises to lift the most weight you can in one rep,’ he said.
Since then, the club has ballooned from two to 20 members, drawing lifters from sources like the rugby team and football team, as well as friends and guys who, like Laipson-Williams and Cappellino, simply lifted as a hobby.
Laipson-Williams said the team generally works out four times a week together, and now has an assistant coach that helps plan workout routines months in advance. He said the young organization is focused on growing and becoming more well-recognized on campus in the foreseeable future.
‘The big goal for next year, I think, is to grow our attendance,’ he said. ‘We need a bigger roster, basically to compete with the big schools down south like Texas. We need more people; we need to take our training to a different level.’
With more members, the team can accomplish more through efforts like fundraising, Cappellino said. With the growth from last year to now, the team was able to host the 2009 Massachusetts High School Championship. They ran the meet and even made some money off it, Cappellino said.
‘When it was just me and Eli, we didn’t do that kind of stuff,’ he said. ‘Now we have a group of guys that can put together events and stuff and it works out really well, and gets us a lot more attention.’
With next year’s Nationals slated to be televised on ESPNU, Cappellino said the team is working toward further growth and bringing a solid contingent to the tournament, which will be held at Disney World in Florida. He said he thinks a good performance there would help the team gain even more visibility.
‘We have a network now. We’ve been up to 20 guys working out at one time in a gym,’ he said. ‘We have a lot of guys that come in and hopefully they can qualify, and we can bring a team of 20 to Nationals one day. Our goal is to win at collegiate Nationals, and that’s a nice thing to go for in the future.’