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Good morning. Villanova brings on a 15-year veteran performance coach for men's basketball, a new study finds work addiction and burnout run across Division I athletic staffs, and a fresh framework helps coaches cut through the metric overload in ice hockey. Let's get into it.
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Villanova men's basketball has hired Kyle Tarp as its Sports Performance Coach, head coach Kevin Willard announced. Tarp spent 2010-25 at Maryland, the last three seasons on Willard's staff - a run that included seven NCAA Tournament appearances in his final 10 years and a 2025 Sweet 16. Willard called him "an elite performance coach whose knowledge and experience will benefit our players' development." Tarp's Maryland players who reached the NBA include Kevin Huerter, Bruno Fernando, Alex Len and Aaron Wiggins.
Dr. Ramsey Nijem went from the youngest head S&C coach in NBA history to Director of Sport Performance on Kansas' 2022 championship team, and he's now opened the summer cohort of his Applied Performance Coach Certification. The 6-week live online course covers strength, power, speed, conditioning, periodization, and workload monitoring, plus the coaching and leadership side.
Coaches get 6 live lectures and Q&As, 20+ recorded sessions, NSCA and ATC BOC CEUs, and a community of global performance professionals. This is the final week to join and it starts June 21. Morning Rep Subscribers get $100 off (use code MORNINGREP). Enroll Now
A new study surveyed nearly 300 NCAA Division I athletic trainers, coaches, and sport performance coaches on work addiction, burnout, and work-family conflict, and found the strains show up across the entire staff. Lead author Alexandrya Cairns and colleagues report:
The findings:
Respondents averaged 55-hour work weeks.
Roughly 29% of sport performance coaches scored as "workaholics" on the Bergen Work Addiction Scale - matching athletic trainers, and above coaches (20%).
Overall burnout was low, but athletic trainers reported higher burnout than coaches; sport performance coaches sat at similar levels to ATs.
Work addiction was positively correlated with both burnout and work-family conflict.
The authors point to family-leave and time-off policies, plus boundary management, as ways to address it.
A new International Journal of Strength and Conditioning paper from New Jersey Devils sport scientist Steven Nightingale and colleagues tackles the flood of external-load metrics now available to hockey staff.
The details:
GPS doesn't work indoors, so hockey relies on local positioning systems or inertial sensors (IMU) - with Catapult holding most of the market.
PlayerLoad, On-Ice Load and Skating Load are highly correlated; reporting more than one adds little new information.
Relative metrics swing widely depending on whether they're calculated off total game time or time on ice.
The authors lay out two paths: report a single volume metric for simplicity, or build a multi-modal model that compares each athlete to their own season averages.
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