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Good morning. A new study finds player ratings of NFL strength staffs don't predict injuries, a how-to on using AI without putting athlete data at risk, and a coach doubles down on keeping the "strength and conditioning" title. Let's get into it.
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In a new Cureus study, researchers tested whether NFLPA player ratings of team training and strength staff actually track with injuries - and found essentially no link. They matched 2024-2025 NFLPA rankings for all 32 teams against league injury data.
By the numbers:
Strength staff ratings were only weakly tied to players missing games (rho = -0.267) and weeks missed (rho = -0.238) - not statistically significant.
Athletic trainer ratings showed virtually no correlation at all (rho = -0.030 and -0.031)
The season logged 1,149 players missing at least one game and 5,811 total weeks lost.
The authors conclude the ratings say little about whether staff actually prevent injuries, though they may still reflect player satisfaction and team environment.
S&C practitioner Rachel Newman laid out how to use AI without putting athletes' data at risk - starting from the unsettled question of who even owns that performance data.
Her practical habits: anonymize before you input anything, stripping names, teams, and dates and letting your AI assign random IDs; formalize vendor agreements and DPAs through your administrator and IT to shift liability off the individual coach; and keep athlete records like session notes, injury logs, and readiness data in purpose-built software rather than the AI tool. Her bottom line: AI output is only as good as the data behind it, so clean, structured records matter more than clever prompts.
Back in April, we ran Dr. Justin Lima's case for uniting the profession under one title. He's back, doubling down: the field should stop calling itself "sports performance" and own "strength and conditioning." His logic - "sports performance" implies responsibility for what happens in games. He points to a coordinator who could pin a dropped pass on the performance coach for not getting the receiver ready. But coaches prepare athletes physically and mentally to handle practice and games; they don't run them.
No title will ever capture everything the job involves, he argues, so the profession should stop fracturing into competing labels, unite under "strength and conditioning," and even push for one governing body.
Georgia Southwestern State University hired Logan Gibson as its first-ever Director of Strength and Conditioning, a newly created role overseeing every athletic program. Gibson arrives from Detroit Mercy, where he ran performance programming for five Division I programs and more than 150 athletes, and previously worked at Lawrence Technological University and assisted Purdue men's basketball. He begins July 6.
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