Notre Dame Sports Performance Director John Wagle Transcript | March 6th
Notre Dame Associate Athletics Director for Sports Performance John Wagle met with reporters on Thursday.
Here’s a transcript of that press conference:
Opening Statement
“I appreciate you all coming out. I know Mike is the star of the show and we're so excited to have him, but I wanted to create some visibility and some transparency into what Spring Ball is going to look like, but also the rationale and the why with that. In order for us to understand where we're going, it is important to take a moment to talk about where we've been. Of course we won a lot of football games last year and we have so much to be proud of with how we moved through that College Football Playoff. But maybe what we didn't see was how our Sports Performance Team impacted that journey as well. We're equally as proud of what happened on the field as what happened off of it. That group's strength is really their commitment to collaboration. It's their commitment to working together. They truly believe that their success is tied together and that they can amplify their impact by coming together in that way. That shows up in a lot of different ways, quite frankly.
“We have a really precise approach to the way that we design practices, and that's led by Marcus (Freeman), but it's augmented by our data and it's day-to-day, week-to-week individualization. Those things are really implemented well because of the approach that Alexa Ackelman and her staff takes to fueling and hydrating our student-athletes within those practices and games. It's how Rob Hunt and his athletic trainers and PTs make timely modifications and are excellent in return-to-play and limiting the days missed and maximizing the chances that our players had to be coached. It's Loren Landow and his impact and preparing our kids for the practices and for the Fall Camp and everything in between.
“Loren was able to move our lower-body power and explosiveness forward throughout the season. You saw the most meaningful inflection point actually during the CFP run. Joey Ramaeker in Sports Psychology, he of course gives excellent clinical care off the field, but he has modernized our approach to Sports Psychology. He leverages the latest technology to help our guys perform in the biggest moments. Matt Leiszler, excellent physician, of course. What you don't see is all the work that he does to minimize the concussion-risk for our student-athletes. All of those things together really allow us to learn a lot. It allows us to refine our processes and grow and look ahead to an excellent Spring. We have a lot of momentum to build off of and that momentum is going to be a more individualized approach to the way we develop our student-athletes.
“We have taken a look not only our data within sports performance, but also conversations with coaches on what they believe the priorities are and learning about what these players really need to reach their full potential. We take all of those things together and we develop an individualized development plan for each guy. To give you a little bit of an example of that at the group level, we've already actually staged the starting point of the offseason and not everybody's start is on the same day, which is kind of obvious in a sense that we had our transfers and mid-years here while we were playing in the National Cchampionship Game. But we've continued on that to make sure that the players had proper recovery windows before we began the offseason, before we started this journey in preparing them for Spring Ball.
“We're going to continue to kind of narrow that funnel for each individual player and really turn the dials of what the emphasis or lack thereof is for each guy. For some, that could mean that they do need to spend a lot of time getting reps in practice and they do need to learn what the situational demands are from our coaches and really allocate that time on the field. But for others, we've identified that their priority might be in physical development or working with Rob and his team to clean up any deficiencies that will maximize their opportunity for availability come Fall. For others, it's going to be working with other support departments to perform under pressure or be a little bit better in these marginal areas because they're already outstanding players. We have such a blessing to work with extremely talented student-athletes. We have a blessing to work with an outstanding coaching staff that's led with Marcus and it's really given us the opportunity to really work backwards from what we want to accomplish in Fall of 2025 and be very intentional about the decisions that we're making within practice and with individualizing our student-athletes development right now.”
As you looked over the data of last year preparing a team to play 16 games unprecedented, where did the data show you what worked and what needed to be tweaked?
“Of course, the first evaluator when you're saying, 'Hey, was this effective or not?' Was, 'Did you win or lose?' Right? That's part of it. And were we abl;e to prepare effectively? Every opponent presents a unique challenge, so we are always balancing, 'Are we doing enough to create those opportunities to know what they need to do tactically?' And, 'Are we doing the right amount to make sure that they're fresh and they're ready and they're healthy to go on Saturdays?' That's always a proxy for us. But we do have other measurements that indicate freshness. We have measurements that indicate how they're holding onto their strength and their power or their joint-level strength or their psychological readiness or how they're sleeping. It's actually a really big combination of things and I realize that frustrating nature of that answer, but we're dealing with a student-athlete that is a really complex being that has a lot of things going on. We're really trying to take that holistic look at each player and how they're working in their position group and what their demands are comes Saturday because that's a challenge too.”
What's your view on injuries from a more scientific standpoint in terms of what may be a training issue and what is just the nature of football?
“I think the proper starting point, the unifying element of every injury ,is that there's a young person attached to that injury. I can say that no matter what the cause or whatever the breadcrumbs to follow, to understand the why of that injury, it deeply affects us because we care about these young people and we want them to achieve everything that they want individually. As Mike mentioned, and Marcus does frequently, to achieve that team glory. However, the things that we really pay attention to process-wise and where our data can be really powerful and the insights of our collective expertise on that sports performance team can be really powerful, are these kind of preventable injuries. There's obviously a very big difference from a player running uninterrupted down a sideline pulling a hamstring than having a very large human being land awkwardly on them, right?
“There's not necessarily as much process audit for that latter piece, but we still pay attention to it mostly because we need to be excellent in return-to-play. Injuries at the end of the day are about the amount of days that you miss, not necessarily the incidences that occur. Because at the end of the day, you've only got so many development opportunities to reach your full potential. So if one of those catastrophes hits and we're dealing with a contact injury, we immediately turn our attention and Rob and his team do a great job in collaboration with Loren and others to say, 'OK, what are the deficiencies that we need to address and use this injury as an opportunity to be better on the back end of it?'”
Was there ever any consideration for Notre Dame to cancel or change their Spring Game format?
“Obviously, that's a decision that Marcus and Pete (Bevacqua) and Ron (Powlus) would make, but I can say from our lens within Sports Performance, we're very careful there that the goal of practicing football isn't to not get injured or some other ancillary thing. The goal of practicing football is to improve our team and to prepare for football in the Fall. So we take every practice day that we're afforded very seriously because of that opportunity for development and for the opportunity to develop this team into what Marcus envisions it can be next Fall. Our role is really to maximize those opportunities for our coaches. We have the best coaches in the world, and so our approach is, 'Let's figure out the way that we can get the most football in while also individualizing that player's development process and focusing on maybe some other areas that downstream, if we take a longer term approach, are actually going to yield a better version of that player.'”
What formula went into determining the number of Spring Practices?
“This is actually an opportunity to talk about how we use our data to make some of these decisions. We had a unique and wonderful situation where we had the Playoff. Throughout Playoff, you're accumulating work to get ready for those games that would usually be allocated to the offseason. We were really fortunate to have that work allocated to trying to win a National Championship. When we looked at what we usually do in the Spring and what we thought our players needed to be well adapted for the Fall season, you take that Playoff workload in mind. We looked at the totality there and structured practices accordingly to try to still get them that total volume of work that we've seen year over year since Marcus has started, that readies them for Fall Camp.”
Are there 10 practices? Or are there 15?
“Somewhere in between.”
Are you more concerned about snap counts, the number of games or the tempo of the game? How do those all factor into trying to get that odometer back to a good place at the end of April?
“Snaps matter because every snap is at least paired with a decision being made by that player and more often than not a collision event or a sprint effort or anything like that. But we do look a little bit deeper into that. A player like Xavier (Watts) with his snap counts, they tend to involve a lot of coverage yardage because he was elite back there versus some other players that are just in different roles. Every snap is a starting point for us, and that's meaningful, but we do need to dive deeper into the context of what those snaps are too.”