Nick Saban Raves About New Sports Performance Approach, Additions

Alabama coach has high praise for recent hires David Ballou and Dr. Matt Rhea

Indiana Athletics

University of Alabama coach Nick Saban was obviously disappointed that the annual A-Day festivities were cancelled along with the rest of spring practice for the football team, but is extremely pleased with a pair of recent additions to the program. 

Saturday afternoon, when the Crimson Tide was scheduled to be on the field at Bryant-Denny Stadium, Saban instead made an appearance on the Alabama Athletics Spring Update Show on the Crimson Tide Radio Network. 

He was especially upbeat about the strength and conditioning and developing sports performance program after host Eli Gold brought up David Ballou and Dr. Matt Rhea, and asked when they 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 responded.

“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 like 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. 

"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 interviewed 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.”

Alabama announced the hiring of Ballou as the Crimson Tide’s Director of Sports Performance, Rhea as the Director of Performance Science, on March 3, just before the coronavirus pandemic started the widespread shutdown of both the sporting world and the university.

"To have the new strength staff in place and already up and running, was a good thing just like it is for all the other areas of our department," athletic director Greg Byrne said last month. 

In early April, Saban called Ballou and Rhea "instrumental" in setting up Alabama's remote training, including getting everyone Apple Watches for their workouts, and apps on their phones for weight training programs,

“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 eight-point [outlook] whether it’s sleep, nutrition and six other things, that contribute to your level of performance. 

"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.

“With David, they sort of 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.”