☕️ S&C Daily — Promote the Contenders, Expose the Pretenders

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Walk into Kentucky's new $3 million weight room mid-workout and the first thing you notice is a screen above the racks showing two lists of five players: the top performers in power output, and the bottom five. They're labeled contenders and pretenders. "My philosophy, from a competition standpoint, is promote the contenders, expose the pretenders," director of football performance Brandon Roberts told the Herald-Leader.

The redesign lets his staff measure nearly everything in the room, but Roberts wanted the numbers public to add peer pressure to summer conditioning. Senior safety Ty Bryant says it changed how guys approach a rep: before, you could get a bench press up barely and call it done - "but now it measures the speed to that, so there's no getting away from it." The leadership piece matters as much as the board. Bryant's approach with anyone in the bottom five is to ask what's going on before jumping down a throat: "If there's a good reason why you're on that list, then OK, I can work with you. But if you're just not taking it serious, now we got a problem."

Teamworks CTO Reed Shaffner asked a room of elite performance staff for a show of hands. Daily ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini users? Most of the room. Built an agent? Plenty. Still using the agent they built? Fewer. Anyone with an AI application actually running in production? Three hands. His point isn't that the technology is out of reach - it's that the model itself is a commodity, and everyone has access to the same one.

What separates people is knowing which problem to hand it. And there is plenty waiting: survey data from 21 performance and medical directors suggests 75 to 90% of the data they collect never influences a single decision. Shaffner's bet is that the staffs who work out where AI actually helps "will have a real advantage."

Want to be one of those three hands? The S&C AI Playbook teaches coaches how to actually put AI to work, with a new Claude lesson every week.

Utah State named David Fukuda department head of Kinesiology and Health Science. Fukuda was the NSCA's Educator of the Year in 2022 and is a Fellow of both the NSCA and the American College of Sports Medicine, with more than 150 peer-reviewed papers behind him.

He arrives from Central Florida, where he spent 13 years as a professor and division chair and helped build the School of Kinesiology and Rehabilitation Sciences, and his research covers sports science, body composition, and exercise and nutritional interventions across the lifespan. He also holds a black belt in judo, which shaped his research into combat sports and martial arts participation.

Southeast Missouri named Billy Wurch its baseball strength coach. He arrives from Arizona State, where he was a graduate assistant running the hockey program's strength and conditioning and assisting with baseball. He has a master's in strength and conditioning from ASU and played baseball at Butler.

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