Richard Graves (00:02.114)
Well, Dr Trevor Short, I am delighted to have you join us on this week's podcast. Welcome along.

T (00:08.175)
Thank you. Appreciate the time and thanks for the welcome.

Richard Graves (00:11.19)
Absolutely. I've got to say for our viewers on our YouTube channel, they'll notice the weather behind you looks fantastic. I'm sure out there in Utah, the temperature's pretty hot as well. But sport never sleeps. That's for sure. Certainly not in your position. And just to give people an idea of your background, three years ago, you earned your doctorate in philosophy, kinesiology, and exercise science. You've got more than a decade's experience.

T (00:18.172)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Graves (00:39.628)
working at different programs in different institutions under your belt as well. And currently, you are the Senior Associate Athletics Director for Health, Wellness, and Performance at Utah State University. So that's quite a lot to ram into the last 10 plus years or so. Just give us an idea of the journey to get to where you

T (00:59.964)
such a good question and what a journey it's been. an enlightening one for sure. I started my career in athletics at Humboldt State University. It's a small Division II school on the Northwest Coast in California. I played football there. ended up getting hurt some time in my career there and got picked up by the strength and conditioning performance team to be a grad assistant strength coach where I just fell in love with the art of training and all things, physiology, biomechanics, training philosophy. and that really just led

To the career path that I'm on. They gave me a wonderful opportunity. In the D2 world, you know, there's not a lot of resources, so you have to wear a lot of hats. And it was kind of my first experience to high performance and all the different units and verticals responsible for success and supporting the student athletes. Let's see, that journey took me to San Francisco. My wife ended up taking a job selling elevators in the Bay Area. So we just we moved to the Bay, ended up getting a job in the

private sector. worked my way up to being a COO of a multimillion dollar training facility, which was a enlightening experience just being in the private sector. It's a whole different world as well. And then around 2020 I decided, pretty early 2020, that I wanted to continue my education, pursued a doctorate degree. At the time, got accepted and enrolled into Auckland University of Technology. I was going to do force velocity profiling with Matt Brugelli there. That was about January ish.

of 2020. We all know it happened in March and the world kind of changed a wee bit. with that basically Visa kind of got shut down. Everything didn't really line up the way that we had planned. so I ended up in Hawaii, which was an incredible experience. I had been there quite a few times working with some NFL athletes as a performance coach. and I had some connects on the island. So it just made sense to go there

get the PhD, pursue performance, ended up publishing some research in the clinical world as well, in some like breast cancer rehab and some things like that, as well as the pursuit of peak athletic performance in that bucket, athlete monitoring, etc.

T (03:08.279)
After that, kind of created a seat for myself at the table at the University of Hawaii. I was the first director of performance and sports science hired in the Mountain West, which was really exciting, overseeing all of the performance and sports science initiatives for all 22 teams there at the University of Hawaii. And then this position opened up and it was hard to pass up. So I essentially sit now in the American version of a high performance director seat in American college settings. And without a medical background, it was really exciting to have the opportunity to sit.

In the United States. It's something that's far and few between and a great opportunity to elevate the field. So here I am.

Richard Graves (03:45.774)
Yeah, absolutely. Here you are indeed. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression you took this role a little over a year ago in May 2025. And you were tasked with leading the modernization and integration of the athlete care and development systems there at Utah State. When you walked through the door and had a chance to assess everything that was in front of you, what was the challenge that you were brought in to solve?

T (04:12.379)
That's a really, really good question, Richard. I think at the end of the day, organizations have found a way to be successful. You know, a lot of them have been around a long time and they they just find a way to be successful. but in this modern era, with everything shifting in college towards a professional model, it requires an elite level of support for the student athletes, very similar to a professional model. The problem to solve really was getting all of the stakeholders, everyone from administration to medical to performance to nutrition, sports.

psychology and counseling and sports science on the same page, right? Working together towards one common goal to centralize our goals, our mission, our values, and what we're trying to achieve. So really it was, it was alignment, I think was probably the common goal, was it was alignment in pursuit of excellence. And in that I think we've come a long way in a year.

Richard Graves (05:03.213)
I know that you're very clear in your belief that athletic support systems shouldn't just operate in silos as their own entities on their own. Now, you will also be acutely aware that many programs actually in essence do exactly that. So why do you feel it is so important to break that down?

T (05:25.795)
that's a really good question as well. Yeah, at the end of the day, our responsibility is to provide the best possible care for the student athletes, right? And that's one, of course, to help win, to help move the needle and the percent chance of winning, but two, just to support the individual as well, right? And

It's a really challenging task for me to ask our unit directors to get together, sit at a round table, collaborate, and discuss because at any given situation or setting, one view might in a way have more weight than another view. Sports psychology and counseling, nutrition, performance, medical, they all have different views, right? But to be able to sit around the table and make a decision that we all agree is just best for the student athlete is hard. But to answer that question as clear as possible, that that's what it's about. What is the best

Possible outcome. What is how do we move the needle for the highest percent chance of success in this situation, in this decision, right? It's not always workload modifications. It could be an opportunity to improve nutrition, sleep, fueling. Like I mean, there's so much context behind just load monitoring or a force plate flag or something else that we've got to get all the athlete all the stakeholders at the table to do what is truly best for the student athlete. And that's why I think it's so important, Richard. It's it's it's all about them, right?

Richard Graves (06:39.757)
That's quite a-

T (06:42.742)
what we do it for. It's it's all about just it's about them.

Richard Graves (06:47.061)
Yeah, absolutely. But that's quite a big challenge in itself, isn't it? Because to some extent it's challenging the status quo. all, practitioners qualify in philosophy. They'll have spent years and years training to be strength and conditioning coaches. Psychology will be another aspect. And now you're saying to them, well, actually, I don't think that best practice is to work in that silo on your own, but to work as one integrated system.

That might mean challenging your beliefs, things that you have entrenched it in your practice for years that you believe thoroughly that you're working. And the challenge comes because as an athlete, as an individual, I think you take your schedule home, whether that's professional or amateur, and you see it as one program. And yet institutions, professional sports organizations haven't practiced in that way. So when you come in and say, right, this is what we want to do.

That's why I say that's quite a big challenge in itself because you are challenging the establishment.

T (07:48.974)
Absolutely. You really are, right? But I think at the end of the day, we want to do what's best for the athletes, but we also, again, we we want to increase increase the percent chance we can win at its core, right? And so from a health, wellness, and performance perspective, to gain alignment, we actually chase three key verticals and goals: athlete availability, improvement in performance, and then optimize athlete readiness, right? And it's really interesting when we roll those things out, if we're chasing a roster availability of 90%, but yet the expectation is that every performance

Metric that we measure shall improve 5%, those two are actually conflicting objectives and goals, right? You can't have high roster availability without exposure to stimulus and expecting adaptation. So just our goals alone in our organization drive collaboration between our groups because they're recognizing how are we going to get these exposures and put our athletes at risk without having that actually be the case that we lose athletes due to trying to get better, right? And so everything at our core.

is systematically engineered to move the needle in those three buckets, availability, performance, and readiness. And if we do all those, all three of those things and objectively quantify it, I feel pretty confident that we can go to our admin and show, hey, we're helping our team win. Here's how.

Richard Graves (09:05.109)
You've just used the phrase there system engineered and I know that over the course of your career, Trevor, you've advocated a systems engineering approach when it comes to working with collegiate athletes. In practice, what does that mean?

T (09:18.437)
That's a good question. At its core, there are

Collaboration and communication entities that occur in all groups, right? So for example, we have 16 programs on campus. Very naturally, we're going to have athletic trainers, performance coaches, nutritionists, and sports psychologists communicating, right? But engineering the system is essentially creating within each of those vertical verticals and units a philosophy or a central node of how we operate. For example, does our dynamic warm-up and activation potentiation include some sort

Of overcoming ISO, some sort of unloaded or loaded horizontal and vertical explosive movement, right? It's not my place to say, hey, you need to do XYZ or squat, front, squat, clean. No, but we probably need to have some sort of that in the program, right? So that's an example in the performance bucket. But every one of our verticals is expected to create a central node of an engineered system because then at the end of the year, so last year, our roster availability university-wide was about 88%, right? Richard.

So hopefully next year, at the end of this year, that's higher than 88%. And I can say it's not just by chance because this is the system that we ran last year, and we're running it back with a couple small tweaks, right? So system engineering is at its core. How do we train? How do we recover? How do we educate? How do we onboard? How do we flag? How do we monitor? What does that mean? What are the interventions? Right? And at the higher level, in my seat, I'm responsible for bringing all these experts together. So across our entire university, we have weekly hybrid.

Performance meetings, right? And of course, that's a forced form of collaboration and unification. However, our agendas that we have are very, very specific. Every group has a pre-identified agenda. Sports Medicine not only is going over the injury report, they're covering each and every athlete in their return to play, what phase they're in, what their expectations are for the week, what they can and can't do in that practice. And that's for all of those verticals. So the system engineering part is really.

T (11:20.951)
If we're trying to have those outcomes, roster availability, improvement in performance, and optimized readiness, well, we need some sort of way to say, I think what we're doing is resulting in XYZ result. And if we modify this this year, is that better than last year?

Right. So system engineering, it's like we know in sport, sporting research is so interesting, right? Like we try to control so much, but at the end of the day, it's still sport and we can't. So we don't really have the ability to say objectively this is why. Same thing in RC, but I think systematically across the board, if we engineer a system and we observe the outcome and we make small tweaks and it's better or worse, there's definitely some percent chance of why things are different. But man, I'm hopeful that in five years we can have five percent improvement in all of our performance measures.

metrics, 95% roster availability, all of our readiness scores are peaking in and around game day or game day minus one. And then I can go back and say, okay, these SOPs, these systems that we engineer, this collaboration we're doing is potentially successful and not just by chance.

Richard Graves (12:25.067)
We're going to get into technology and data in a moment because that's another side to this discussion that is hugely important. But before we do, one final question on the ethos behind your principles and the philosophy being employed at Utah State now. How do you go from looking at the question of how do I improve the department to the broader question of how do I improve the program? How do I improve the systems?

T (12:52.299)
Mm. It's a good question. And I think it it takes different hats.

I think information that we share with coaching staff looks very different than information that we share vertically to administrators and donors, resource investors, et cetera. And so with that, maybe a good example of something that we're doing for the first time here is we have a roster availability percent for each of our 16 teams. Really hard to find peer-reviewed, published research on what is a typical women's soccer roster availability throughout the course of the year, right? Like what should that look like? But if that is 90 for us, that's great.

If it's 80 for us, we have some work to do, et cetera, right? How we use that information shared with the coaching staff, they just want to know that our team is healthy. Sharing that vertically to admin, we now can use some of our NRL NIL revenue contracts and calculate the actual cost or burden, financial burden of those athletes not being available. So it's it's how the information is disseminated that I think is different. To the coaching staff, they just want athletes: are they ready? Are they available? Are they going to perform well? Right? That's the question.

administrators, how are you protecting our assets? How are you developing our program? Those conversations naturally lead to, well, if we want to improve in this space, we potentially need more resources, more staffing, etc. So same information, but the dissemination and the KPIs look quite different. Hopefully that answers the question.

Richard Graves (14:14.997)
Yeah, like, yeah, it absolutely does it. And as you touched upon there, all coaches, all departments, they want data. They want to be informed. So with that in mind, where does data fit into the sequence of things here? What's the difference between being data informed and data driven, for example?

T (14:34.617)
Hmm, good question. Well, I think it always starts with alignment first. We align first with our programs, then we provide data to support the questions that come from our coaching staff. So that I think that at its core is at its core is a really important principle that we strive for. We're we're hoping to answer the questions that coaches might have and then educate them on things that maybe they don't know that they want to know about as well. data comes second here at Utah State. and I think there's a reason for that. One, we're trying to understand coaches' philosophies, workloads.

volumes like if a coach is a volume if they like to run a volume based program right that might look totally different than a than a coaching staff that doesn't have a they have more of a pro model like the what we do how we make decisions is completely dependent on coaching philosophies and so we need to align first and then allow the data to support them. So with that we use go ahead yeah

Richard Graves (15:27.673)
If I can just jump in there, was going to say, with that in mind, how do you ensure that you're collecting information that actually improves decision making for the individual or the group rather than just collecting more data?

T (15:41.786)
that's good question. Nothing that we collect, we don't use. so that's at its core. Nothing that we collect, we don't use. So at the beginning of each year, I have what we call high performance director one-on-ones with each of our coaches. We look back at last year, what went well, what didn't go well, etc. And there's a couple key questions that we ask. It's, you know, what things are we doing that we should keep doing? What are we doing that we shouldn't do? And things like that. But at its core, our athlete monitor athlete monitoring cycle and the data we collect in includes external load data, so some sort of wearable tech.

Internal load data, some sort of physiological response, some sort of neuromuscular status, mostly in the vauled suite, whether that's force plates or for our volleyball athletes, internal, external rotation on the force frame, et cetera, and then subjective readiness questionnaires. And those four entities allow us to track and monitor all of our athletes essentially. With that, we have conversations with our coaching staff of what are some of the most important things for you to know about. For example, just yesterday, we had a conversation with our volleyball squad on

Is our team fit enough to play five sets? Do our jump heights decrease set over set over set? And so what we then do is build custom dashboards around those questions that those coaches in real time, when those APIs pump the data through, those coaches can go in and actually look at set over set fatigue in vivo, if that makes sense. And they can look and see that. So we build our infrastructure based on the coaching staffs that we have. And coaching staffs change. We basically delete everything, and then we have an out-of-the-box, really baseless.

level monitoring system and then we build the custom suites following to best support that coach, their philosophy and what questions that they think will help them win.

Richard Graves (17:20.889)
as you've just touched upon there, departments change, staff change, and it stands to reason as well that with the wealth of data that you will collect on an athlete, different departments, different disciplines will view that athlete differently. I guess that one of the biggest challenges then is to bring those different entities together to ensure you're making the best data-informed decision for the progress, hopefully, that that athlete is going to make. How do you go about it?

T (17:51.044)
Hmm.

It's a good question. I think that goes back to the system engineering piece and the philosophy and the alignment. I I really think it's there at its core. In our weekly meetings, those agendas are are engineered to cover where we're at in the athlete monitoring cycle, what decisions we're making. and I think an important note there too is that we

have a periodization structure for our decision making as well as our monitoring. And what I mean by that is if we're in fall camp and availability percent is dropping and athletes are flagged on day four of fall camp in our football program, we expect that. So those flags and where they're sent and what type of information is coming from that looks very different than a game day minus two in season flag. Right. And so our fall camp flag thresholds are a lot higher and and harder to hit. And even within that,

Our coaches are pretty

their culture is earn not given. And so even then you have to you have to almost earn your right to be monitored in a way, if that makes sense. You've got to you've got to get there to be a trusted athlete that is just gonna grind. And then at what point would you break do we need to say whoa, we're looking for the people that we need to say whoa, not go, to then athlete monitor, if that makes sense, right? And so I think at its core again that goes back to the alignment principles, understanding coaches, understanding their philosophies, and then building the sport

T (19:15.409)
data tech suite to best support them.

Richard Graves (19:18.709)
Is that what success in this instance looks like for you to be able to collect enough data and have enough information and collaboration to be able to pull back on the reins if need be? Or is it a case of ensuring that the health of an athlete is at its optimum? Their readiness is where you want it to be. Their development is progressing and you can see it. And that puts a performance then...

T (19:23.087)
Mm.

Richard Graves (19:44.969)
out on the field or the court, whatever it might be, is that what success ultimately looks like in this instance?

T (19:50.82)
That's such a good question. Personally, I define success for our unit directors as the endless pursuit of excellence in your bucket. And the reason I say that is again, because our core principles and what our objectives as a department, greater than 90% roster availability, 5% improvement in all performance characteristics, speed, agility, power, strength, you name it, and then optimized readiness on game day. That's basically Z-score, that's high. One.

So it's really hard to do that. And those are those are conflicting goals at their core, right? And so I think what does success look like? If we found a way through Bayesian statistics or something to show that health, wellness, and performance increases the percent chance that we win, I think that's success.

in my seat, if that makes sense. I don't know if we'll ever get there, but in my mind, and I might be biased in the seat that I sit in, but if our best athletes are available to play in championship season, if they're a better athlete than they were when they got here, and every day that they have a game, they show up more prepared than their average, I think we're doing our best.

to improve the needle or to move the needle on the percent chance that we win. And that's what I think success is. How do we help our teams win? And I think we've chosen to go through that through those three key objectives overall.

Richard Graves (21:14.925)
OK, given that that's ultimately the goal you'd like to reach. Let's take a size sample then. If we were sat here three years from now, Trevor, having this conversation, and I said to you, can you tell me what has fundamentally changed about the way Utah State cares for its athletes under your watch? What would you ideally like that to be?

T (21:41.872)
That every intervention, every prescription, every principle is best practice. Peer-reviewed best practice, moving the needle towards what is objectively best for the student athlete, if that makes sense. Everything that we do has a rationale, everything that we do has a system behind it, an SOP, how we collect data, how we cue, how we coach.

every piece of that is is an SOP in a way where I could say, Okay, Richard, here's a fifty page PDF on how we operate here and I'm pretty freaking confident that this is why year over year these are the results that we get. If that makes sense.

Richard Graves (22:18.957)
And in your opinion, it does absolutely make sense. And in your opinion, is this the natural progression for the way we work with athletes, not just in the collegiate system in the States, but going right up to the pro sports level as well? Because as we've touched upon up until now, we've come a long way with sports science, particularly over the last 20, 25 years. But there still seems to be areas, like you say, that work in silos. There isn't joined up thinking all the time. And ultimately, let's not beat around the bush.

That can lead to keeping athletes off the field of play.

T (22:53.189)
I would agree. I would agree. I think it's really easy to talk about high performance and the collaboration needed. It's really hard to sit at the table and drop the ego and say, My perspective for this student athlete in this specific situation is not as valuable as X, Y, or Z, right? An example might be a student athlete that has some mental health challenges.

The perspective from the sports psychologist and counselor might look a lot different than it would from the sports science seat of the wearable tech and the force plate flag, right? And so being able to sit down and recognize that yes, I I collect a ton of data and I've done all this flagging and filtering and a ton of work to get here, but at this current moment, that might be what's best for the individual.

To be able to get there, I think is it's challenging. And we're we're working in a field where you know every one of our unit directors has a decade plus of experience in their field and they're very they're a baller at what they do. They're really good at what they do, right? But to ask them to see it from another lens is really I think that's really where we need to go. And I think that philosophy is an organizational approach and a cultural leadership approach more than anything. but we here at Utah State and under my leadership will always start with who first, then what?

what, the who has to be right. We gotta have the right people on the bus and the collaboration and everything else will come.

Richard Graves (24:16.501)
It's funny that you mention egos there because it reminds me of a conversation I had a few years back with Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots when they were winning all their Super Bowls. And I said to him at the time, what is the secret to success here? How have you been able to do it in an era of the salary cap? And he said, simple, first and foremost, no matter who you are, whether you're a rookie coming onto the team or you're Tom Brady at the time, you check your ego at the door. And it strikes me that from what you're saying, that doesn't just apply in that instance.

but it applies across all sporting spheres, and particularly in what we're talking about now. Listen, Trevor, it's been an absolutely fascinating conversation. I'm sure, like me, our viewers and listeners have been drawn in by everything you've had to say. Where can they find you on social media if they want to find out more and follow the success stories we hope it will be at Utah State?

T (25:06.127)
yeah, good question. Probably best would maybe be LinkedIn. not really active on Instagram or LinkedIn, but maybe LinkedIn would be best. Happy to share my email as well. It's just Trevor.short at usu.edu. if anyone has any questions or anything like that, more than happy to connect and chat.

Richard Graves (25:21.297)
And for those with larger monitors, if they're watching on YouTube, you will see little dots moving on the field behind you in the window. Football practice is in full swing. There we go. Utah State, the collegiate system is just around the corner. Listen, Dr. Trevor Short, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks once again for your time.

T (25:26.927)
Ha ha ha.

Yeah.

T (25:39.099)
Appreciate you. Thank you.