I actually am a S&C guru. I have a BS in Exercise Science, and did my Master's in ExPhys with a concentration in Strength and Conditioning here at UM - we have one of the best strength and conditioning education programs in the country:
https://sites.education.miami.edu/e...-conditioningfitness-entrepreneurship-m-s-ed/
Heavy squats and Olympic lifts in season is correct.
If you're curious, you should look up what's called Periodization. This is the concept of creating a long-term strength and conditioning program for athletes - in this case, collegiate athletes. Every coach worth their weight knows this concept and this is practiced across all levels of all sports now by coaches who know what they're doing (this is something Swasey never did).
You find when the season starts and work your way backwards to when first workouts are. You can then parse the block of time you have into mesocycles and then further down into weekly and individual workouts with a few defining goals, characteristic of each block.
In the beginning, 4-6 weeks of training should be spent on learning technique, unilateral exercises and different loading schemes to activate core musculature and establish a neuromuscular "base" for training, with general metabolic conditioning at the end.
After that, the next block of training should focus on hypertrophy, with distinctly hire volume in this phase to promote muscle growth and improve conditioning.
After that, with these bases created, the focus is on strength, where the intensity (percentage of 1RM) goes up significantly (85%+) with lower reps to make the athletes stronger.
The last phase should focus on power and sport specificity, which is strength with a time component. The best way for us to load this concept is with Olympic lifting, which should have been gradually getting heavier and heavier throughout the season, from learning technique to now, where the athlete should now be capable of lifting extremely heavy loads explosively with good form. This should make sense: Now that we are in season, we should be at our most explosive, with a base of technique, conditioning, and strength - we want the athlete to be the most powerful and explosive at the start of the season and to maintain that power as best we can through the season.
ACL injuries are unrelated to heavy Olympic lifting if proper periodization has been implemented throughout the workout regimen.
However, non-contact ACL tears are on the strength coach and there should be a heavy emphasis during training on hamstring work, particularly knee-flexion biomechanics (hitting the hamstring through knee-flexion like leg curls as opposed to high hamstring work through RDLs). This squat and Olympic lifting work can create a huge imbalance where the quads are overdeveloped, so proper caution should made to make sure the hamstrings and posterior chain are getting enough work.
