Carmen Colomer, Director of Sport Science for the Philadelphia 76ers National Basketball Association (NBA) team, talks to the NSCA Coaching and Sport Science Program Manager, Eric McMahon, about translating numbers into actions. Topics under discussion include periodizing athlete’s recovery in the NBA and how learning to code can help with data analysis and application.

Find Carmen on Twitter: @CarmenColomer1 | Find Eric on Instagram: @ericmcmahoncscs or Twitter: @ericmcmahoncscs

Show Notes

“So I collect a lot of the data. I analyze it and then interpret it. So there's always the terms of inferences, like am I appropriately analyzing the data instead of understanding if there has been a meaningful change there as well? So I think that's where sports science comes in. Rather than just looking at, say, a percentage change, we can actually look at a few more high level statistics and understand when a change has occurred.” 5:20

“I think broadly speaking, with my role, it's translating the numbers into the actions. So it's sort of asking yourself, OK, well, what can this coach do with this information? So I think how you can get certain messages across probably becomes one of the most important parts of the job.” 7:27

“I think the last point is that in most sports or most of the literature you'd hear them talking about having 72 hours to recover post games, but unfortunately, we don't have that luxury. So I think we just sort of capitalize on, I guess, finely tuning things. If there's any low-hanging fruit, that's where we migrate towards first.” 12:00

“And there's no point of doing that and just collecting data for the sake of collecting data. And I think, in any organization, when you first come in, you need to be careful that you're not just trying 100 things at once. It's typically an iterative process. Implement one thing and maybe fine tune that for a little while before implementing more.” 20:27

“I don't think anyone in sports science is ever right. I think you just become less wrong.” 22:42