Chip Kelly is at the forefront of the movement of bringing Sports Science to the NFL and he has brought one of the leading players in Sports Science to the Eagles and his name is James Hanisch. James Hanisch bio is very impressive and he has risen from Sports Performance Analyst in 2006 in Australia for Australia Rules Football to Sports Science Coordinator for Oregon's Football Program in 2012. You can guess who brought him in and, of course, it was Chip Kelly and Kelly recently has been able to woo him to the Philadelphia Eagles where he is listed in the front office as a High Performance Analyst. Let's stop and think about this for a minute, Hanisch has 9 years of experience in this discipline and is one the earliest adopters of Sports Science. In man's man language he is the man in this industry and along with Shaun Huls, who serves as the Director of Sports Science and Reconditioning, serve as the leaders of Sports Science and Performance Department. All of this talk about Sports Science leaves you wondering just what the heck do these guys do, right? Ok I'm give it a few sentences and I hope I do it justice though I don't think I can. Let's go though!Sports Science is the discipline of tracking players risk, readiness, and return to play data using a monitoring system developed by Catapult Sports. Catapult on their website says "You know exactly how hard your guys work in the weight room, but how do you know how hard they worked on the field? How do you measure performance? Develop normative data for each position on your team - a valuable tool to objectively measure a new recruit." This means wearing body sensors and buying in to Sports Science as Hanisch mentions in a Grantland article in 2013. The athletes have to believe that this helps them perform better as a professional athlete and wear the sensors even sleep monitors which is a data point that Kelly wants to track as well. It's this sophistication and dedication to Sports Science that allows an executive like Kelly to take chances on athletes like Sam Bradford, Kiko Alonzo, DeMarco Murray, DeMeco Ryans, and Ryan Mathews and in the past Jeremy Maclin. These athletes all are high risk injury players but they all have major NFL talent that if healthy can catapult (pun intended) the Eagles to the top. It's a risk that was well thought out as Chip recently said "the only way we get a Sam Bradford is because of his injury history" but as I tried to lay out, he really believes in his investment in Sports Science and is banking that this department gets these players through reconditioning to perform at their max capacity.
Buy in is very important as stated earlier and it's probably along with some other factors the reason why DeSean Jackson and LeSean McCoy aren't members of the Eagles now. We are all waiting to see if this faith in Sports Science will pay off and lead the team to the top.
It's definitely a gamble but I'm all in on the gamble, are you?
No comments:
Post a Comment