☕️ S&C Daily — Rip the Bandage Off

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The Wichita Wind Surge - the Twins' Double-A affiliate - are the only club in Minor League Baseball with an all-women athletic training and performance staff. A new MiLB feature goes inside it: athletic trainers Taylor Carpenter and Asja Morello, and strength and performance coach Meagan Vota, who between them handle the rehab, recovery and lifting for some of Minnesota's top prospects.

Vota came up through cheer - a four-time All-American at Louisville - and had never played baseball, so she learned it, getting in the cages until she could throw, catch and swing a bat. "It creates an opportunity for them to teach me while I teach them," she says. The three run "daily vibe checks" and a monthly breakfast, and cover for each other when someone needs a day. Carpenter, who's worked staffs without that: "Having the three of us together has been really valuable."

Old Dominion women's basketball has hired Grace Hunter as assistant director of sports performance, bringing her over from Purdue.

Hunter played D-I basketball at NIU and North Florida through last season - four-time team captain, three-time academic All-MAC - and moved into strength work in 2023, starting with an internship where she managed injured football players. At Purdue she ran performance for the cheer teams and worked across softball, soccer, track and both basketball programs. At ODU she'll coach under Tim Socha.

TeamBuildr's Rachel Newman breaks down what a federal job code would mean day to day for coaches. S&C coaches currently get folded into "Exercise Trainers and Group Fitness Instructors" or "Coaches and Scouts" in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' classification system - so a CSCS with a master's and a return-to-play caseload shares wage data and job-growth projections with a spin instructor.

That single line item feeds salary benchmarks, insurance classifications, grant eligibility, and whether a district budgets a full-time coach or stacks the role onto someone's existing contract. Newman's point: a field that isn't measured can't show growth, which makes every downstream fight - pay, staffing ratios, justifying the position at all - harder.

In a new CHL feature, Damien Sutherland, lead performance coach at the Canadian Strength Institute - which has worked with the OHL's Ottawa 67's since 2017 - explains why he throws junior players into hard training right away instead of easing them in.

Most arrive as teenagers with almost no weight-room experience. "Go hard in the beginning, give them a rough time starting off," he says: show a young athlete what training like a pro actually feels like and they get accustomed to it faster. From there it's load management - keeping a kid who skates 25 minutes a night intact through a three-game weekend, then holding strength through a playoff run without draining the tank. On the off-season, which he handles with weekly check-ins for players scattered across Ontario: it "funnily enough, feels like the on-season for a strength coach."

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