Accountability and Applied Sports Science

No professional likes to have her or his competence challenged, but there are always going to be collaborators that are better than others. Applied Sports Science depends on successfully integrating athletic training and sport coaching with clinical and technical disciplines. Failure can be measured in two ways: losses and injuries, and the two often go together.

Who gets held accountable? Media frequently has someone to blame for losses. The coach or a key player underperforms, according to the standard narrative. Injuries are more like blameless acts of God, unpredictable and severe, unless the player exhibits patterns of disability which gets them the “injury-prone” label. These are easy stories to write, which makes them easy to believe. But in professional sports today the collaboration is so extensive and multi-faceted that the diagnosis for a loss or an injury post-mortem is unlikely to be a singular cause that is easy to understand.

The Toronto Raptors have simplified a lot of the accountability for player injuries. If there’s a muscle injury then strength coach Alex McKechnie is responsible, according to a recent Globe and Mail article.

“Soft tissue injuries, like hamstrings and groins, are all preventable,” [Gary McCoy from Catapult Technologies] said in an interview. “Alex is the first guy I’ve heard say . . . ‘Look, injuries are going to happen. But those soft-tissue, preventable injuries? They’re on me.’ He takes full responsibility. A (Jonas) Valanciunas groin or hamstring? Alex takes full responsibility for that. That’s why those things don’t occur. There’s so many other strength and conditioning coaches that go, ‘I can’t prevent that.’ Well, yeah, you could. If you knew what you were doing, you could prevent those injuries.”

Other organizations put players in charge of their own bodies. Al Horford tore and then re-tore his left pectoral muscle. Both times the injury resulted from overdoing it in the weight room, and now he is training much differently, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“As soon as the first injury was feeling better, I started to work out hard and heavy again,” he says. “Then I reinjured myself on the other side. That’s when I realized I had to make some modifications.”

Now he focuses more on body weight exercises, lower body and core strength. “No more bench press or heavy dumbbell biceps curls,” he says.

Teams gain from have a single point of accountability on player injuries. A team like the Raptors has a stakeholder and an expert in place to understand what is going on with athletes’ strength, fitness and health. It helps the players. They get better care and better information.

A Raptors-like org chart also helps the other high-level stakeholders in the Applied Sports Science collaboration, namely the coaches and front office, who can engage a peer to consider short- and long-term strategic options.

The alternative, a players-based framework, is unwieldy, and like with Horford and the Hawks, more likely to lead to both injuries and losses. And if a team has the right org chart, but the person in the McKechnie spot is not seen as a peer, then it might as well be players-based. The chart part of the org chart might be right, but the org part–the person in the McKechnie role–is wrong.

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