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Joey Batson recalls the time he first encountered Boyd Epley in person. It was on an elevator in New Orleans in the late 1980s.

Batson speaks of the moment as if he had encountered Elvis.

“I got on the elevator, and Boyd got on it with another guy,” said Batson, now the director of football strength and conditioning at Clemson, the defending national champion. “I was just a graduate assistant at Clemson back then, man, and I’m standing there looking at this dude like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s Boyd Epley.’ I didn’t even know what to say. I almost turned my back to him. I was intimidated.”

When Epley, a pioneer in the world of strength and conditioning, recently visited Clemson’s state-of-the-art football training facility -- accompanied by Nebraska head strength coach Zach Duval and a few NU administrators -- Batson no longer was intimidated. After all, Batson has two national championship rings not to mention 30-plus years in the business, including 23 as Clemson’s head strength coach.

“But believe me, it’s a source of pride for me to say I was brought into this business by a guy who worked with Boyd Epley,” Batson told the Journal Star, referring to Gary Wade, the former Clemson head strength and conditioning coach (1985-96).