320: The Challenges of Modern Collegiate Sport

Richard Graves is joined by Heather Farmer, Assistant Athletics Director, Sports Science at UNLV, to discuss how sport science has developed within collegiate sport and how UNLV has built a human-first, data-informed performance model. Heather explains why data should support decision-making rather than replace practitioner judgement, how to build coach and athlete buy-in, and why the lack of female athlete data remains a major challenge. The episode also covers wearable technology, AI, return to play, the transfer portal, and the importance of strong communication across the whole high-performance team.