Maximizing Player Performance

It’s the summer of 2003, and the Oklahoma Sooners football team doesn’t have much to complain about. The squad is ranked No. 1 in the Associated Press and the ESPN/USA Today Coaches’ Preseason Poll, and the Sooners are enjoying the return to national prominence brought upon by coach Bob Stoops and his dominating defense. The team is preparing for a season that would see it lose the National Championship in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. But while players work to get their bodies in peak shape for another grueling season at the top, the second year of an unusual science experiment is being performed with ramifications that will impact athletes, not just football players, across the world. “There’s a lot of tradition with football,” said Scott Anderson, the head athletic trainer at Oklahoma, “but not a lot of science.” That was about to change. How it started It his eight