☕️ S&C Daily — Trust Is the Biggest Thing

October 1, 2026

“I’m not where I want to be,” Zion Williamson said at Pelicans media day Monday. His camp and the Pelicans believe he has finally found the formula to get there, and it started with a hire. At the start of last season, people close to Williamson brought in Kris Chrisp, a performance coach who specializes in wellness and recovery, to work with him daily.

Chrisp was tested right away. Williamson suffered a Grade 1 hamstring strain in early November, and weeks after returning, an adductor injury that doctors initially thought would cost him two months. Chrisp told him they could beat that timetable. Williamson was back in two weeks after missing six games, then played 35 straight, the longest streak of his career, and finished with 62 games, his second-most. Chrisp says he reported to camp at 271 pounds after being listed at 284 for most of his career.

The work went past rehab. When Williamson first showed him his home gym, Chrisp told him, “Bro, this gym is terrible. Let me go in and redo the whole thing.” He did, and he pushed stretching, sleep and knowing how his body should feel after workouts. “Trust is the biggest thing that you need when you’re working with these guys,” Chrisp said. “You’ve got to make them believe.”

In a new Athletic piece, programs across college football are racing to put AI to work, and Florida’s director of sports performance and analytics, Spencer Thomas, calls it an “arms race within AI.” USC has even created a director of artificial intelligence role.

Nebraska is one of the most aggressive. Coach Matt Rhule came home from an offseason conference on Claude Code, an AI tool that writes code from plain instructions, and built agents that read Nebraska’s practice schedules, game scripts, travel itineraries and practice GPS data. If a play gets run 15 times in practice but called once in a game, the agent can flag it. At Florida, the Athletics Databank holds more than a trillion data points on its athletes, and Thomas uses AI to pull out single markers like single-leg balance for athletes coming back from knee injuries.

Nebraska’s Sean Padden vets everything the models produce before coaches see it. “It will flat-out lie to you,” he said. “It can be a wizard, but it can be a drunk wizard. You have to check the work.” Still, he sees the upside. “My hope for the future is that coaches get home earlier at night,” Padden said.

A new study in Frontiers in Physiology ran 12 trained male collegiate athletes through four complex training protocols in a randomized crossover: one traditional, and three with blood flow restriction cuffs set at 60%, 70% and 80% of arterial occlusion pressure. Countermovement jumps, leg muscle activation and blood lactate were measured before and at 4, 8, 12 and 16 minutes after each one.

Traditional complex training produced significant changes at some time points, but 70% was the most consistent of the four. At 8 minutes, jump height (ES 0.37) and relative peak power (ES 0.94) were both up, and peak power stayed elevated at 12 minutes. The 60% and 80% settings were less consistent. The authors call it preliminary evidence that 70% may be a suitable pressure for BFR complex training in warm-ups, with the response strongest 8 to 12 minutes after.

Writing on his Substack, Steve Magness makes the case against punishment and “toughness” workouts, pointing to Arizona State hockey player Matthew Mayich, who collapsed during a preseason workout in August and is in a coma. ASU’s own review acknowledged the coaching staff never submitted the activities to its strength and conditioning coaches for review.

His list of what goes wrong: no control to stop or slow down, rest too short to hold form, volume that was never built up, no one reading fatigue and no plan for heat. “We do shared suffering all the time. It’s called training,” he writes.

The Buffalo Sabres posted an inside look with head strength and conditioning coach Jake Nitsche, walking through the team’s everyday routine and workout schedule. Nitsche breaks down the science behind planning team workouts, what works best for different players and how the staff manages training during the season.

San Francisco Giants

San Diego State University

Spalding University

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