☕️ S&C Daily — A Little More Human

October 20, 2026

Alex Bina is Clemson football's director of applied science, a role he helped build from scratch. It started in 2015, when he was a bioengineering Ph.D. student. One of his professors met Tigers strength coach Paul Hogan on a playground while their kids played, and the introduction turned into a student project analyzing GPS data from sensors in players' shoulder pads. Early on, the operation was sometimes Bina in a corner of the weight room with a laptop.

From there he studied players' sleep and helped build the recovery program. Now he oversees the performance data and the recovery work, from cryotherapy to infrared light, with about a dozen students in a lab the players call "The Castle." The player who uses recovery the most each year is crowned King of the Castle.

"We're in the business of quality of life improvements to make this really hard thing - playing and training for college football - a little bit easier and a little more human," Bina said.

A new study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, led by Andrea Hudy, tracked 10 Division I women’s basketball players across two seasons. Accelerometers measured training load, and single-leg balance tests on a force plate measured sway velocity, a marker of neuromuscular control. Training monotony, which is weekly average load divided by its variation, jumped in early preseason and then held steady.

Sway velocity stayed relatively stable and had no link to monotony. The authors suggest coaches use monotony to flag periods of higher training stress, and sway velocity as an individual baseline for spotting meaningful changes in neuromuscular function.

Kyler Gordon had played in just five of the Bears’ previous 25 games, slowed by hamstring, calf and groin injuries. After two stints on injured reserve in 2025, the team held a virtual meeting with its trainers, strength and conditioning staff and the people Gordon worked with away from Halas Hall. The goal was one plan for his rehab and offseason training. When he still showed up to offseason workouts with a calf injury, the Bears sent him to a specialist.

ESPN reports the problem wasn’t just the calf. A source said “something wrong with the way the glute was firing” created a posterior chain issue that strained both his calf and hamstring. Gordon rehabbed near Chicago with Montel Fleming, who works on body alignment and injury prevention. In his first game back Sunday, he had three sacks and two forced fumbles in a 31-23 win at Atlanta.

Houston will honor late strength coach Kurt Hester with an “Unbreakable” jersey patch Saturday at Utah. Sunday marks one year since his death after an eight-month fight with melanoma. “Unbreakable” was his personal slogan.

The Windy City Bulls, the Chicago Bulls’ G League affiliate, hired Trevor Sackmann as head strength and conditioning coach. He spent six years at the University of Hawaii, working with multiple sports programs.

Canelo Alvarez moved his camp to Gandia, Spain, to train with Oleksandr Usyk’s team, two hours off Riyadh time, ahead of his Oct. 31 fight there. His last fight in Riyadh started at 6 a.m. for him. “It takes like 21 days to adapt,” he said.

What’s the single biggest challenge in your job right now?

We’re looking to better understand what strength coaches deal with each day. The more detail, the better. We read every answer.

The Conor Group

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

University of Central Florida

Duke University

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