Illinois Hoops Recruiting Thread

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#601      
derrick6
Keisersose said:
Fletch is highly respected in the industry by his peers, coaches and players for a reason. What more evidence do you need that he’s one of the best? Players have credited him for their development, coaches have raved about him, yet Illini fans on and Illini fan forum are asking for more evidence that he’s a tremendous asset and one of the best in the biz? Come on people.

We are the only fanbase I know that does this. I don’t get it.
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Quite strange indeed. Fletch at the top of his game so let’s knock him down and discredit his accomplishments and eliminate the recruiting advantage. Wow
 
#602      
FreshlySqueezed
STL Illini said:
I have no opinion of what’s ideal regarding S&C for high level D1 athletes.
I trust Fletch has his reputation for excellence based on limitless opinions from people in the know.
That’s all I really care about on the topic.
On a separate note, I’m not going to pile on to Altgeld. The guy has an opinion and expressed it. Many may disagree, and that’s perfectly fine. In Altgeld’s defense, I find him to be one of the top 10 posters on this board that I enjoy reading. His writing and story telling is second to none. His passion for the O&B is certain.
I’m not gonna tag him as some random, anonymous poster based on one post.
Thumbs up to you Altgeld for your contributions to Loyalty.
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The lifting numbers he threw out were higher than what LeBron does. So when someone is saying an 18 or 19 year old kid should be lifting heavier than LeBron James, I think it's absolutely fair to take issue with it.
 
#603      
texillwek
Dr Copejam said:
Walking Glancing GIF
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high quality someone GIF
 
#605      
pruman91
More3s said:
Yeah fair points. I probably shouldn't have said anything on it, although I do think with fitness and performance in general there is indeed a temptation to get fancy for no real benefit (and sometimes it's a detriment). But you're right that Fletch has a great reputation and I have no grounds to say it's not well-earned.

Also, I'll add that I really felt like, especially later in the year, you could CLEARLY tell our team was often just better conditioned than our opponents, and we'd wear teams down and pull away in the second half regularly. So hat's off to Fletch.

Oh and if he plays a part in landing Will Riley or other players of that caliber, than he's worth his weight in gold...
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#606      
Illiniforlife
altgeld88 said:
TL; DR: We have no idea. S&C programs appear to waste incredible amounts of time and resources and leave untold amounts of athlete performance on the table. These guys should be lifting heavy, which will enable them to couple their genetically-gifted neuromuscular efficiency (explosiveness) with immense force production, armor them against injury, and realize their physical potential. It won't happen anytime soon. Then they should go practice basketball. Skip the BOSU balls.

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I'll post what will certainly be an unpopular response (lol, who am I kidding... I'm gonna get dogpiled): we have no reason to believe he's a star in absolute terms though he may well be relative to other S&C coaches simply because the bar is set so low. I'll note in advance that I've never seen his training plan, and have only seen the social media snippets of guys in the weight room that the DIA publicizes. It seems clear, however, that a lot of performance is being left on the table, and our guys could benefit by being much stronger.

Any D-1 athlete is a genetic freak residing at the extreme end of the distribution of neuromuscular efficiency. Someone has a 35-inch vertical jump (or a 48-inch one if he's Darrell Griffith or MJ) because he's crazy efficient at recruiting motor neurons to contract muscles. It's not something that can be trained except at a very small margin (adding perhaps a couple %.) Bring these guys in at 18 and you can literally do little more than feed them and they will grow, get bigger by the time they're 22, and look like gods throughout.

D-1 players are on the court partly because they're incredibly explosive, a.k.a. "powerful." (In extremis: TSJ.) That power is a function of the force they can apply over a distance in a unit of time. "Time" is the explosiveness variable and (e.g., the SVJ) isn't amenable to training. But you can train the force component: lift heavy weights. Anything less is a suboptimal approach to using the limited time available for training. SVJ, agility, etc... can't be trained for meaningful gain. Strength certainly can, for years on end.

I may be wrong about what Adam is doing with the guys; however, from the social media I see, it's not lifting heavy weights. It's lifting fairly light weights, balancing on BOSU balls while asymmetrically loaded with dumbbells, and other suboptimal exercises.

I'm unaware of a single basketball program in which the S&C coach trains players meaningfully for strength. Everyone on our team should be at the very least squatting 500 and deadlifting 600. Probably much more. (Kofi probably should have been pulling upwards of 800.) The development of that kind of force production combined with innate neuromuscular efficiency would maximize their physical potential. It would also make them a great deal more difficult to push around on the court and bullet proof their joints (esp. knees) from injury. It would make them stronger, more powerful, more resilient athletes.

(Let's dismiss the strawman here that this will make them into fat, sluggish, mediocre linemen. No, it won't. Or, horrors, "musclebound.")

The problem is that head coaches aren't informed consumers of S&C programs, and so an S&C coach who wants to keep his job will never risk training his athletes to lift properly (and, frankly, few if any S&C coaches appear to understand how to lift properly.) Mark Rippetoe of Starting Strength fame has written at great length about this topic for many, many years. (This article from 2016 for example. Yeah, it's long.) The barrier to entry here is understanding the mechanics of safe, efficient lifting, learning to coach it, and teaching lifters how to manage psychologically when the load gets really heavy. It's an acquired skill that takes time and intelligence. So instead we get high-volume sets at light weight, relatively light "squatlifting" with a trap bar, and "heavy squats will injure your knees!" Yeah, they will: if you do them incorrectly. If you do them correctly, which is fairly easy to learn, they'll write you an insurance policy against torn ACLs.

As for endurance, strength is an incredibly persistent adaptation. Getting up the cardio conditioning curve is a pretty quick process: we gain and lose that capacity quickly. Getting up that curve when you're very strong is effortless. Adam may well be making our guys relatively stronger than the competition, so they're better conditioned. I have no idea, of course, because I don't know how he trains them. It's obvious, however, that they don't lift meaningfully, and so a lot of potential goes unrealized. That's a shame.

It's incredible that these programs leave so much on the table where athlete performance is concerned. It's such low-hanging fruit it's unbelievable that it's ignored. I have little confidence, however, that it will change anytime soon.
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I think this post is very informative and has a lot of good points. I will say this as far as ACLs go we have not had one since Fletch arrived (knock on wood) a lot of that has to do with mobility and flexibility which Flex does a lot of work on. He also understands that putting only mass on players is no longer the way to play basketball. That is great for football but not basketball. You need to be able to move quick and have good twitch movements. The old strength coach before Fletch was a nice guy but he always just had the guys lifting for mass and being as big as possible (didn’t work great for tisdale). Obviously there are injuries in every sport and you can’t stop them all but major injuries you can do some preventive things and I think Fletch has done a great job of that. Also a lot of schools and NBA teams have tried to poach him I think that speaks volumes too.
 
#608      
Quasimodo101
derrick6 said:
Quite strange indeed. Fletch at the top of his game so let’s knock him down and discredit his accomplishments and eliminate the recruiting advantage. Wow
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The "Dunning - Kruger Effect".
Those who know the least, the least empirical evidence, are often most assured of super knowledge.
I am in my 50th year of coaching, though not basketball. I am not qualified to question BU or Fletch. It is a waste of energy, and I don't have to admit I was wrong. I can tell some of you know quite a bit, but I see some "Dunning - Kruger Effect."
 
#610      
SoILIllini
genxrex said:
View attachment 35179

Say no more...btw just how many knees has Fletch helped with rehab and strengthening without reinjury here at Illinois?
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These are the transformation pictures that are most telling. What a difference 3 years made.

The before and afters taken in front of a wall with one flexing and one not can be misleading, but we've seen plenty of these year over year transformations that are enough to sell me
 
#611      
Yukon
BretMyBeachHouse said:
Back in the day (a decade ago) when I had some connections to the program, it was said that the strength guys spent more time with players than anyone else. Coaches literally had time limits put on them in terms of working with them, but not strength guys. Therefore, the mental aspect of the S&C guy was as important, or more so, than what he accomplished with the actual weights.

I have no doubt that Fletch is really good. I do doubt that his S&C ability is that much better than others in the field.

The soft skills, so to speak, I have no clue on.
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Not sure I get this. As a former athlete, I didn't need my S&C guy to be my buddy. I needed him to be there for me and push me when I didn't want to work out or was having a bad day. Maybe times have changed but I always thought the fact that he was there and pushing me meant he cared and I appreciated that.
 
#617      
More3s
BWA said:
I love posts like this. LOL.

We will know more when there is more to know.
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I guess I needed the /s. (unless I'm missing your sarcasm? lol)

Although I'm also down for a subject change, so I guess it wasn't pure sarcasm.
 
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