☕️ S&C Daily — What the Stopwatch Misses

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The fastest lineman in a study of 123 Division I football players covered ten meters in 1.98 seconds. The slowest skill player took 2.04. On a stopwatch they are the same athlete, and they would get the same program. Writing for Sportsmith, Cameron Josse argues that program helps neither one.

The study measured two things against each player’s bodyweight: how hard he pushes into the ground on his first steps, and his power, which is that push combined with how fast he applies it. Power predicted ten-meter time in every position group. The push on its own only mattered for the heavy players. A lineman pushes slightly less hard for his size than a receiver does, but he does it while moving about 110 more pounds, so getting out of a stance is a force problem for him and a speed problem for the receiver.

Josse’s fix is prescribing resisted sprints by how much the sled slows an athlete down rather than by a percentage of bodyweight. Linemen take heavier loads that cut their speed by half or more, to build the push they are short on. Skill players take light loads, a 10 to 30% drop, to protect the speed that separates them.

Nebraska volleyball hired Sean Smith in June as director of volleyball player performance and development. He came to Lincoln from Hintsa Performance and the Arrow McLaren IndyCar team, where the performance coach handles far more than the training. Smith built individualized plans for drivers covering constant travel, commercial obligations, administrative duties, nutrition, psychology and strength work, and he handled time management, recovery and mental health on top of that.

Smith said Nebraska’s players are carrying a version of the same load, with schoolwork, NIL deals, revenue sharing and the attention that comes with all of it. "I’ve told all the players that I am the GPS in the car," Smith said. "They’re still in the driver’s seat in terms of their own development. I can’t make them want to be great. They have to want that intrinsically, and they have to want that for themselves."

Hawaii’s football team trains in Klum Gym, a historic building with no air conditioning that the program calls the Iron Church. Bobby Thomas, in his second year as director of football sports performance, does not pretend it is the room he would build. "Would we all like to have the pretty weight rooms and all the special stuff? Yeah, absolutely," Thomas said. "But we got what we got."

He mixes Olympic lifting, powerlifting and mobility work rather than committing to one system. Linebacker Jamih Otis said the room stopped mattering to them a while ago. "Regardless of what that looked like, the facility, what coaches were here, we had an end goal in mind," Otis said. "The purpose was always gonna be there, no matter if the plates was metal or the plates was wooden."

University of Portland

Loudoun United FC

Saint Peter's University

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