☕️ S&C Daily — The No. 2 in Charge

October 21, 2026

Cooper Flagg entered the NBA at 205 pounds. Heading into his second season with the Mavericks, he’s at 228. The Dallas Morning News credits the Mavericks’ strength and conditioning staff, led by Geoff Puls, with helping drive the gain. Puls, a Marine Corps veteran, previously ran the Chicago Bulls’ strength program.

His trainer, Matt MacKenzie, noticed it at minicamp in Los Angeles last month, the first time he saw Flagg in a cutoff tank top. MacKenzie said Flagg’s shoulders are noticeably stronger, which he believes will help him absorb contact and stay balanced.

As a rookie, Flagg led Dallas in points, rebounds, assists and steals, the first rookie to lead his team in all four since Michael Jordan. The Mavericks open the season Wednesday in Houston. “I don’t think there’s any areas where adding strength can hurt you,” Flagg said.

Urban Meyer, who won two national titles at Florida, was asked to help vet candidates in the Gators’ coaching search. After one phone call with Jon Sumrall, he called a member of the Board of Trustees and told him they’d found their guy. Florida is 5-2 in Sumrall’s first season, coming off an upset win at Texas.

On Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich, Meyer said Sumrall runs the program the way he ran his, down to who’s second in charge: the strength coach. That’s Rusty Whitt, Florida’s director of football performance and a former Green Beret, who worked with Sumrall at Troy and Tulane. “He’s the culture,” Meyer said.

TeamBuildr has partnered with Universal Speed Rating (USR) to put USR’s in-season speed program inside the platform. Starting this fall, high school football coaches can add it to their TeamBuildr account. It’s one session a week, under 30 minutes, run pre-game, with every exercise, distance and rep count already filled in.

The thinking: speed is harder to build and harder to keep than strength, and a team that stops sprinting in August has lost most of that work by midseason. USR’s answer is to keep sprinting year-round, with the dose periodized. “Speed data becomes valuable when it changes what happens next,” said USR co-founder Les Spellman. Add the free program →

A new systematic review and meta-analysis pooled 17 studies in which athletes were given a placebo and told it was caffeine. The fake dose still helped.

Compared with baseline, the placebo produced a small-to-moderate performance boost, an effect size of d = 0.49, across tests from the bench press to cycling time trials and repeated sprints. The authors flagged design limits in the studies, so the exact size isn’t settled.

In a new Strength Coach Network post, Dr. Justin Lima credits Donnell Boucher, the former head S&C coach at The Citadel, with sharing speed data the right way: the time of day, weather, timing system and surface alongside his athletes’ times. Lima says that context is mostly missing now, from coaches posting GPS speeds without naming the system to companies pushing normative sprint numbers without saying how they were collected.

His example is the 10-yard dash. At Iowa, athletes started on the line with a hand start and laser time. At Towson, they started a yard behind the laser, so it was really an 11-yard dash. At Elon, Nick DiMarco starts athletes on the 10 with the laser on the 1, a 9-yard dash. All three are valid and repeatable, Lima writes, but they can’t be compared. “Ignore data that does not have context,” he writes.

Clemson unveiled the $40 million Brown Family Pavilion for men’s basketball, a project that also expanded the strength and conditioning, nutrition and sports medicine areas both basketball programs share.

Gotham FC named Megan Young director of human performance, leading a unified medical and performance department. She comes from Seattle Sounders FC and spent 11 years on Auburn’s strength and conditioning staff. In 2023 she became the first soccer coach named NSCA Professional Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year.

New Mexico State hired Todd Forcier as director of men’s basketball performance after two seasons at Memphis. He was the Portland Trail Blazers’ head strength and conditioning coach in 2022-23.

Seattle Mariners

Washington Nationals

Philadelphia Union

Indiana Wesleyan University

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