Ultimately, all we are trying to do here is educate, we are all trying to bring about a change through education.

The 2015 Edition of The Seminar brought us Michael Regan from Port Adelaide Football Club to discuss athlete tracking and how we, as coaches, can use it to help better our training and our talent identification. After an introduction and overview of what exactly the AFL is (including the demands of the game and profile of the athletes) Michael starts right into the role of sport science in the AFL. He touches upon the role of the sport scientist in monitoring and readiness, game rotations (subbing patterns), injury reduction, and how they categorize drills to set up training. This leads directly into Michael breaking down the roles of each person in the high-performance environment with strength coaches and sport science, what the difference for each of these positions, and includes the actual roles of each person on their staff’s role with the players.

Next Michael breaks down the high-performance manager position. This includes, but is not limited to: describing fatigue, describing performance, describing their system, predicting fatigue, predicting performance and declines in performance, and predicting growth from drafted players. This breakdown includes how he looks at the data throughout the season, what information he’s looking at, how he’s displaying it. Michael then shares with us different examples of athlete tracking in sports (American football, basketball, and diving) so coaches have a different idea of what is going on within the sports, and different examples of how information was communicated. He finishes off with how athlete tracking and sport science can be impactful with scouting that was an idea that started with a meeting he had with a GM of an NFL team, how they make the projections, and how they break down data to do so.

This presentation is a fantastic breakdown of the roles and responsibilities of an HPM in Australia, which is a role that still has been difficult for us to make work in America. This breakdown can be a great assistant and guide for directions as to how we can better implement a high-performance model here in the states for the betterment of our athletes, but it must be noted that this is not a “plug and play” model and should be used as just a guide and advice but not a direct “do this” for your program.