I'm a strength and performance coach in New York. I've worked in Division I athletics, in pro basketball, in private practice alongside sports physical therapists, on the sports technology side, and now at HSS. The jobs themselves have been different. What hasn't changed is that I was there to solve a problem, and the problem was always human performance.
If you want to know how a coach thinks, ask them what they've changed their mind about. This is mine.
Five years ago I was still looking for the right program. The assumption underneath it was that for a given sport, a given time of year, a given athlete, there was a correct prescription, and my job was to go find it.
I don't believe that anymore. An athlete is a complex adaptive system. What they adapt to is biological, psychological, and social all at once, and none of that sits still long enough to be predicted in a spreadsheet in August.
So the most useful thing I can put into a training plan is signal. Consistency in the prescription, so that when something shifts I can actually tell what shifted and why. Signal usually comes from simplicity, not complexity. Then I watch how the athlete responds and let that decide the next block.
You can't know the whole plan up front. You can build something clear enough that the athlete's response tells you where to go.
Every setting taught me something the one before it couldn't. College taught me systems. Pro taught me individuals. The clinic taught me what it takes to get somebody back. The startup taught me that good information nobody uses is worth nothing.
BS, Applied Exercise Science. Interned at The Citadel and the University of Michigan, which is where I first saw how differently two serious programs can solve the same problem.
MS, Exercise Science and Nutrition.
Assistant strength and conditioning coach, working under the head S&C with hockey and basketball. Two sports with very different demands and the same weight room, which is a good early lesson in what actually transfers and what doesn't.
First full-time role. Owned the programming, delivery, and coaching of strength, conditioning, speed, and agility work through the off-season and the season.
Different resources, a different calendar, and a different set of constraints than Dartmouth. Learning how much of a plan is really a response to what the building can support.
Working directly with physical therapists on athletes coming back from injury. This is where the handoff from rehab to performance stopped being a theory for me and became a set of decisions I had to make every week.
Pro basketball, where the roster changes under you and every athlete is on a different contract, a different clock, and a different point in their career.
A venture-backed sports technology startup, where I ran comprehensive performance assessments. Force plates and dynamometry from the VALD suite, VO2 max, lactate testing, SFMA. A lot of data on a lot of athletes, and a close look at how little of it changes anything unless somebody turns it into a decision.
Exercise Physiologist on the Sports Rehab and Performance team at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, alongside a private practice with retained athletes.
My first year in the NBA I brought a college model with me. In college you can run a more blanketed prescription across a group and get a lot of people better. In that room it wasn't enough.
There was one guy who needed real heavy loading. Eighty to ninety percent of a one rep max, regularly. Looking back, I don't think I gave him enough of it.
Nothing went visibly wrong. But I was managing a group when I should have been coaching individuals inside a group, and that distinction has shaped every program I've written since.
I nerd out on the training. I like being in the gym, I like coaching, and I like watching an athlete adapt and change and grind through a session that had something in it. The technical side of this is interesting to me on its own terms and I've never gotten tired of it.
I also like the people. The relationship you build with somebody while you're both working on a hard thing over a long stretch. Hitting a wall and finding the way around it together. The fraternity of it.
Both of those are why I'm in the gym on a Tuesday in February when nothing exciting is happening and the work is just the work.
They're also why I'd rather ask a lot of questions than arrive with a system. The science is what makes the work worth doing well. The relationship is what makes it survive a real season.
Athlete, agent, or organization, it starts the same way. What's the problem, and what's the reality around it?
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