How Michigan State and Will Morlock Helped Build Porter Martone’s NHL-Ready Body

The Flyers first-round draft pick is one of the NCAA's best case studies for players going from the CHL to NCAA.

Eight months ago Porter Martone arrived at Michigan State weighing 198 pounds.

By the end of March, after completing his freshman season of college hockey, Martone joined the Philadelphia Flyers checking in at 210 pounds and had dropped his body fat percentage by 3 percent.

Martone then proceeded to help drive the Flyers into the playoffs with 10 points in nine NHL regular season games and then had an additional five in the postseason before Philadelphia was ousted by the overpowering Carolina Hurricanes.

Within the hockey world Martone’s year-over-year growth was one of the best commercials and recruiting pitches in a new world where CHLers are looking to the NCAA to either enhance or extend their careers.

It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that on Tuesday Ethan Belchetz, a 6-foot-5 power forward and presumptive top-10 pick in the 2026 NHL Draft, committed to Michigan State and plans to leave the Windsor Spitfires to potentially follow a similar path to Martone.

If you ask Martone, as I did during the season, he gives a ton of credit to Will Morlock, Michigan State’s director of athletic performance for hockey. Morlock, who has worked at Michigan State since 2022, is well renowned within USA Hockey as well, serving as the strength and conditioning coach for multiple Under-20 and senior world championships in the past three years.

“That was a big part of his recruitment process, he wanted to be a great Spartan and part of a great team, but he really asked during the recruitment about how we could help prepare him for the NHL,” Morlock said. “He recognized and I was lucky to work with a staff that allowed me to do that job. The off ice was a huge part of our culture and that was a huge part that (Martone) was looking for, and he really valued … it’s an accessory to the on-ice, but it was still pretty untapped with (Martone). Playing in major junior you don’t get the same opportunity to train, more than any exercise that we did, it was just him leaning in and everything he could and being a sponge when it came to the training part.”

Morlock said Martone’s attention to detail behind the scenes, he called it an intense drive, was the reason they saw such physical maturation in such a short period of time.

“There was intent behind what he was doing,” Morlock said. “You can’t just go into the gym and assume you’ll get better, you’ve really got to do it with great intent. That was what I was most proud of, his training and workouts, they looked different from the start to the end of the season because he matured with it.”

When it comes to hockey training with Martone, and all players, Morlock said it’s important to work backwards from the ice.

“I’m smart enough to know there’s no jumping in the game of hockey. Sprinting on dry land doesn’t always translate to the game,” Morlock said. “So looking at everything through the lens of the gym can be misleading … it was a huge collaborative effort also talking to the staff in Philly, and looking how we could help him add to his body composition to become an NHL body.”

Morlock and Martone worked heavily on adding both strength and power to his game, in both straight line and lateral avenues. Morlock is also a big advocate that strength and power are related, but different. Strength is a measure of, well, how strong you are. Power is more of a measure of efficiency and proper usage of that strength.

The other key, Morlock said, is understanding that while college hockey’s schedule allows for more time to train, there’s also an understanding players won’t be at 100 percent every weekend if you commit to the plan.

“You can’t possibly peak every single Friday, so we try to make our money Monday to Thursday so we are better at the end of the first half of the season than we were at the beginning, and then better at the end of the second half than we were at the start of the second half,” Morlock said. “The goal becomes to grow through all those elements in the gym, so what might have been peaking in the first half of the season becomes a norm at the end of it in many ways.”

Within a weekly schedule, Morlock said Monday is more of a moderate day, while Tuesday is a big ramp-up day. Wednesday and Thursday have some build, but are designed more about enhancing Tuesday’s work.

“I use the phrasing sting, not destroy,” Morlock said. “I think it’s periods of more or less (work) depending on the schedule, but it’s always with the goal of further development and not maintenance. Because if you only try to maintain, that’s all you’ll be.”

Morlock said his first year of working with former CHL players didn’t come with too many surprises, he said from an off-ice perspective it’s similar to someone coming from the USHL, but it did give him some appreciation for where players have come from and what they’ve worked through.

He’s also a big advocate of the two systems working well together, the CHL and the NCAA, and how time spent in the OHL, WHL, or QMHL gives him a better picture of how and what a player needs to work on to add or accentuate their path to pro hockey.

“My job isn’t to change their game on the ice or anything like that, my job is to help them add the tools they need as we work backwards from that,” Morlock said. “I think when you look at it that way, and you get kids that want to work, like (Martone) you can kind of see the results, and it’s been really fun to see him take that to Philly.”