ABOUT
I wanted to understand the principles behind them.
1
How I Think
I've always been more interested in what was true than what I already believed.
The higher the stakes became, the more that mattered. Every decision affected a real athlete, and reality had a way of exposing flawed thinking. If something didn't hold up, I wanted to understand why.
I was fortunate to spend more than a decade working alongside exceptional coaches, practitioners, and researchers. They were relentlessly curious and held themselves to incredibly high standards. Years around people like that changed how I thought. Good ideas don't get protected there. They get challenged.
Getting a good outcome was only the beginning. Throughout my career, I kept seeing coaches make very different decisions and yet consistently produce healthy, high-performing athletes. If they were making such different decisions, what were they all getting right? If two different approaches could both work, something had to be true underneath both of them.
I realized I couldn't compare what any of them were doing until I was describing it the same way. So I started to define, classify, and codify the decisions coaches were making. Not to standardize how coaches trained, but to better understand the intent behind every decision. Once I could describe them the same way, I could compare them, learn from them, and better separate what I thought was happening from what actually was.
2
What Experience Taught Me
Every environment forced me to answer the same question in a different way.
At UCLA, working with nationally competitive programs where championships were on the line, the focus was creating an environment where the details mattered, and people held one another accountable to them.
At UC Santa Barbara, the challenge changed. I was now responsible for more than 450 student-athletes and an entire staff. Protecting that same standard meant building the facility, the systems, and the operations to support it.
Memphis presented a different challenge. We had access to tremendous resources, novel technology, and world-class practitioners. There were many different ways to intervene, and several of them could have worked. Finding another intervention wasn't the hard part. It was choosing the best one for this athlete, at that moment.
No matter the environment, the question never changed. What's the best decision for this athlete, right now? No single methodology could answer that question on its own. It came from understanding the principles behind many different approaches and knowing which one this athlete needed in that moment.
3
Why OPM
After years of working across different environments, I realized I hadn't been refining programs. I'd been refining judgment by defining, classifying, and codifying training decisions into a framework that made them easier to understand, compare, and improve.
I eventually called it Objective Performance Method.
It was what I was already doing. I just made it repeatable enough that it doesn't need me in the room to work.
If this way of thinking resonates with you, let's talk.
