Fred Roll, formerly Kansas University's director of strength and training, is headed to the Pacific nation Tonga to work for the Rugby International Board.

After tackling workouts for American professional athletes, Fred Roll is off to the Pacific island nation of Tonga to help with a newfound love – rugby.

Roll, who was Kansas University’s director of strength and conditioning from 1989 to 2002, is headed to Nuku’alofa, Tonga’s capital, to work for the Rugby International Board. He’ll be helping junior rugby teams there prepare for the 2009 world competition in Japan. He’ll also work with the Tonga senior men’s team as it prepares for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, to be held in Auckland, New Zealand.

He’ll spend 10 months a year there during the next three years.

“This is a dream job opportunity for me, and I get to live in paradise for a little while,” Roll says.

Roll, 62, is a native of North Carolina. He started his coaching career in 1970 at a high school in Durham, N.C., and noticed that while there were many big, physical kids, they had little or no conditioning.

“I saw how quickly and easily the athletes got injured when they started playing, so I developed the Fred Roll workout to help them achieve strength and balance,” he says. “It’s a bit like a ‘pre-hab’ routine. Most people have an area of weakness in their body, and if an exercise or conditioning program doesn’t take that into account, the imbalance will increase and cause injury.”

His routine is geared toward bringing awareness to that area of weakness. The athlete is then encouraged to balance and strengthen the body’s core muscles so the weakness is integrated into their routine, and better balance is achieved.

When his tenure there ended in 2002, Roll worked with former KU basketball player Roger Morningstar, then-owner of Sport-2-Sport at Clinton Parkway, to help train athletes.

One of those was former KU defensive lineman Gilbert Brown. When the Green Bay Packers didn’t renew Brown’s contract in 2000, he worked extensively with Roll. When Brown reached a svelte playing weight of 339 pounds, the Packers re-signed him in 2001.

It was another former KU football player, Chris Maumalanga, who invited Roll to Tonga to meet his uncle Feleti Tui’halamaka, who coached a small rugby team that hadn’t won too many of its games. Roll spent eight weeks working on the team’s conditioning. The team surprised everyone by winning the “B” pool in national competition.

“I was hooked after that,” he says. “I fell in love with rugby and the islands, and Feleti’s become a great friend.”

Roll moved up to train better clubs each year. In 2005, Tonga’s junior rugby team came second in the “B” pool when it played in Dubai.

“We were promoted to the ‘A’ pool after that and were eligible to play in the Junior Rugby World Cup in Wales earlier this year,” Roll says. “We did really well, and we’re now ranked 13 (out of 95 teams) in the world.”

While Roll is away from Lawrence, Heather Flachsbarth, former Lawrence High School and University of Arizona volleyball player, will continue to teach the Fred Roll workout principles at First Serve (formerly Sport-2-Sport) while he’s away.

“But Lawrence is still home to me,” Roll says, noting he plans to return to Lawrence full-time after the 2011 World Cup competition. “The Lawrence people are the best salt-of-the-earth people, and I consider myself a true transplant.”