All sports nutrition professionals should be able to answer basic nutrition questions. However, athletes with complex nutrition issues should be referred to the appropriate resource as explained in this book excerpt.

Yancy McKnight, Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for football at the University of Texas, and Matt Van Dyke, Associate Director of Applied Sports Science at the University of Texas, discuss how they keep everyone on the same page with the use of data to program training, create buy-in, and prepare their athletes for the demands of the game.

The purpose of this article is to outline the three general formats in which sports science programs are implemented within intercollegiate athletic departments and to provide pros and cons of each situation.

Congratulations to the 2020 NSCA Award Winners!

The NSCA is offering a new book that contains a holistic overview of the knowledge and skills required to support athlete and team performance as a modern-day sport scientist. Learn more here about this new resource.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are commonplace in business and sport. They offer an objective means to link data and processes with performance outcomes. Yet, their application in sports performance, particularly team sports, is not without issue. Here, we review 4 key issues relating to KPI application in team sports; lack of a universal definition, complexity of performance, drifting from on-field performance goals with off-field targets, and agency issues across different key stakeholders. With these issues relating to sports performance KPIs in mind, we propose a complementary approach to help practitioners focus on implementing the conditions that create performance environments and opportunities for success in a complex sporting environment. Ongoing process trackers (OPTs) are quantifiable measures of the execution of behaviors and processes that create the environments, cultures, and conditions for successful performance outcomes. This approach equips sports science practitioners with key questions they can ask themselves and their team when starting to select and use OPTs in their program.