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Saban: David Ballou, Dr. Matt Rhea 'light-years' ahead of others
On Saturday, Nick Saban revealed when the pair of former coaches from Indiana first landed on his radar.
247sports.com
Alabama head coach Nick Saban officially announced the additions of David Ballou and Dr. Matt Rhea, the two men that will lead his strength and conditioning program, in early March.
During an interview with Crimson Tide Sports Network broadcaster Eli Gold on Saturday, Saban revealed when the two former Indiana strength coaches first appeared on his radar.
“Four or five years ago, these guys were at IMG when actually some of our fourth- and fifth-year players were at IMG and heard a lot about some of the state-of-the-art sports science stuff that they were actually into and doing there, just when you’d visit in recruiting or whatever,” Saban told Gold. “I never really thought much about it, and then when we had this opportunity come up, we researched these guys and they’d done a phenomenal job at Notre Dame of eliminating injuries by something like 50 percent and even better at Indiana.
“So, when they came in and we interviewed them, there was no question that from a sports science standpoint and from a conditioning standpoint they were light-years in advance of what a lot of people have done in their programs for a long, long time, which we’ve done the same thing for a long, long time, too. And we’d actually brought some NFL people at the end of the season because we wondering if there was something that we could do to improve performance and injury prevention because we seemed like we’d gotten a lot of guys hurt this past season.
“So, we were already going down this path, so then when these guys came on board, everybody else we interview was pretty much like a strength coach of the past, and these guys were really way advanced in terms of some of the things that they did to prevent injuries, some of the training programs that they had -- velocity training, explosive movements. Just really, really excited to have them here in the program. The players love them. They’ve done a phenomenal job in transition, and I think, longterm, this is going to be a real asset for us.”
Although the two new coaches were unable to spend much time on campus before the novel coronavirus pandemic forced everyone to leave campus and remain at their homes, they were instrumental in organizing remote training programs for all of Alabama’s players.
Ballou is the Crimson Tide’s director of sports performance, while Dr. Rhea is the director of performance science. The two replaced longtime strength coach Scott Cochran, who left for an on-field position at Georgia after spending the last 13 seasons in Tuscaloosa. They each have titles that are new to UA’s staff directory, so how much do their roles differ?
“We have the sports science center now, but I think there’s a lot of things now that people have researched that contribute to performance,” Saban said. “For example, Dr. Rhea has an 8-point -- whether it’s sleep, nutrition and six other things -- that contribute to your level of performance, and he can actually show players on graphs by testing that if you’re 100 percent in all these areas and you sleep eight hours, you’re still going to be 100 percent. And if you’re 100 percent in all these areas and you sleep six hours, your performance is going to drop 20 percent.
“He can show players that if you do a vertical jump and a standing broad jump and one other lower-body test, I can get you to rehab yourself up to a certain level, you’re going to significantly reduce your chances of getting an ACL. So, these are the kinds of things that he does.
“They manage the training programs. When I say manage, I’m talking about what we’re going to do together, and then David implements it. But instead of these guys actually running drills, like when we were doing our offseason program, they actually observe drills and they make notes on what players need to do what to improve their performance. This is a completely different level of how you go about training high-performance players, and I think it’s something that we needed and certainly welcome.”
