☕️ S&C Daily — Not Just Time Off

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This is James Franklin’s sixteenth year as a head coach, and at Virginia Tech he is running camp differently. Players who followed him from Penn State say the standards did not change but the workload did. Practice length and rep counts now move based on what the sports science staff sees and what players report feeling.

That staff is new. Franklin hired Shaun Huls as director of sports science after thirteen years in the NFL, including the Chip Kelly Eagles teams where the job barely existed yet, and most recently Cleveland. Quarterback Ethan Grunkemeyer has worked with him since the summer on mobility restrictions, side-to-side asymmetries and movement he does not need to be making.

Defensive coordinator Brent Pry, who coached under Franklin before, described the change this way: “We’re more intent on how we practice, how long we’re out there, how many reps in this period, how many reps in that period.” Franklin also moved to NFL-style summer OTAs, which pushed installation out of camp and freed those reps for situational work.

The Jets are expanding their performance center by 250%, and director of player performance Erik Korem says the point is how often they test, not what they test with. One force plate session tells you where a player is. The same measures repeated across a week or a training block tell you which way he is going, and that is what he wants to program off.

Korem is clear about the rest of it. The weight room supports what gets built on the field, and camp is aimed at getting players ready for 65 to 75 snaps. On all the technology going into the building: "You can have tools, but do you have the people behind those tools?"

VALD has acquired GymAware, putting its velocity-based training hardware under the same roof as NordBord, ForceDecks, ForceFrame and DynaMo. GymAware started in a Canberra garage in 2002 and has been cited in more than 1,100 papers. Its makers say 65% of US pro teams use it. FLEX, the laser-based version built for everyday gyms, is part of the deal. Neither company has said what happens to pricing, or whether GymAware data will land in VALD Hub alongside everything else.

Marc Hill is leaving Kentucky for BYU’s executive team after 27 years, and the route he took is the story. He arrived in Lexington in 1999 as a strength and conditioning coach, moved into administration, and from 2019 was deputy athletics director, running point on football, men’s basketball and capital projects. When Mitch Barnhart announced his retirement in March, Hill was the presumed internal favorite to replace him. Kentucky hired J Batt away from Michigan State instead.

Columbia has announced Kyle Dickinson as its director of football sports performance.

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