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Let’s Talk Trash! MARCH/APRIL 2018
©2018 The Keenan Group, Inc
NFL AGENT -Frank Gaitan Frank is a graduate from Florida State University with a major in Criminology and Criminal Justice. After graduating, he moved to Phoenix, Arizona with the goal of attending Law School. Instead, he found his career path changed which lead him into a more exciting career as a National Football League Agent. Remember Jerry Maguire? Frank will be contributing to Let’s Talk Trash!-news each issue. If you have questions for Frank, email: fgaitan@iconsmg.com. Or, send your questions to Let’s Talk Trash!-news at debbiekeenan@earthlink.net.
As a young athlete, your main focus is about making it to practice, giving it your all, eating right, honing your skills, and working to become a better player. Basically, it’s about effort. The more effort you put in, the better player you can become. Sports are changing! As you get older and continue playing, this will become more and more apparent. At the college and most certainly the professional levels, sports are getting smarter... Analytically and Technologically. You may have heard of the movie starring Brad Pitt, called Money Ball. Money Ball was about a major league baseball teams’s general manager and his unique approach to how he assembled the team’s roster with a limited budget in 2002. He couldn’t simply just pick the best players, so he used an analytical (statistical) formula to find undervalued players that would give his team the best chance to win. He was basically trying to predict future behavior based on all the data that a player had accumulated over their past performance. Since no one else in the sport was doing the same, those players had more value to him then all the other teams; therefore he could sign those players at a cheaper cost. It seems to take the human element out of the equation right? Could that possibly work? Well, to some degree it did. He was able to put together a team that started out slow at first, but ended up tying a league record for 19 consecutive wins and made it to the playoffs. Unfortunately, they didn’t win the world series, but ironically two years later, the Boston Red Sox who mirrored his approach…DID! Since that time, a number teams in various sports have used some form of analytics to assemble their respective rosters.
Science and Technology are also playing a major impact on sports as we progress through the digital age. Examples of how they are being used can be found not only within the walls of every professional franchise, but also in elite athletic performance training centers around the country. A great example of how science is used to impact performance is with a particular trainer who is preparing one of my clients for the upcoming NFL draft. The trainer’s background is not only as a professional athlete but also as an aerospace engineer. He has been able to transition what he learned from making high performance military aircraft more efficient into how to he can impact movement, energy, and acceleration for athletes. The concepts and laws of physics are exactly the same. Once he applies the science to where and how to focus on the movement, he leans on technology to track the results. There are numerous devices used across the industry that measure movement (location, speed, and acceleration), bio mechanics (to determine stress on different parts of the body), strength, recovery, brain function, and so on. Every day new technology companies are coming up with new ways to track and measure performance.
The digital age is upon us. For those of you who become higher level athletes, you will undoubtably be exposed to these advances. For the rest of you, I want to stress the future opportunity for you in the digital space. Take as many computer and digital classes as you can, because that is the wave of the future. Who knows, maybe you will be the person developing the next leading edge technology for professional athletes.
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Phyllis & Sloane Hunter
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