Bridge Post #4

The Center of Excellence has a large team of graduate students and faculty involved with the development of hundreds of college athletes. With the wide variety of sports, performance levels, competitive time frames, and academic schedules involved in our program, sound and effective communication is of utmost importance to ensure excellent service is provided to ensure our athletes perform their best. Bridge Athletics helps to provide a means to communicate between coaching staffs. Having all the information stored on a shared network allows our whole program access to each other’s work. This allows for quality control from team to team to be implemented.
Additionally, these communicative efforts go beyond just among faculty, but also from coach to athlete. Athletes can leave notes in their programming that will be updated to the server in real time. This allows the coach the ability to have athletes leave notes that are related to their personal programming. Not only could this serve multiple purposes for the strength and conditioning coach to keep better tabs on
the individualization of their athletes, but it will also help their fellow coaches have that ability to with everything in house on the Bridge server, further cementing quality communication and understanding among all involved in the development of our athletes.
Whether it is universal terminology shared for every athlete, appropriate volume loads are implemented at the appropriate times in relation to the competitive calendar or being able to look back on the history of the team’s training program to see where they have been in the weightroom and how to plan for the future. Bridge acts as a standardized method to perform a variety of tasks.

Kurt McDowell, MS, CSCS
Doctoral Student, Sport Physiology and Performance
East Tennessee State University