The Summer League launched its inaugural Sports Medicine Series on July 13–14, aiming to deepen the understanding of athlete health and explore ways to optimize athletic performance.
More than 20 speakers participated in the two-day event, featuring prominent figures such as Brook Lopez and Jalen Suggs. Other notable guests included Phil Coles, Executive Director of Performance for the Boston Celtics, and Danielle Langford, Player Rehabilitation Manager for the Golden State Warriors.
Mauricio Cunille Loustalot, a staffer monitoring the two-day event, mentioned how rare it was to get different perspectives in the morning session on the second day. Tommy Sheppard, a longtime NBA executive, moderated a panel which included Lopez, Suggs, Maggie Bryant (head trainer of the Clippers), and Todd Ramasar (player agent). All of them work towards different interests, so it was compelling to hear how they had to work together to find common ground when moving forward with monitoring load management of a player.
An example of how vital sports science is to our game is how Fernando Pereira who is a cognitive coach of NBA players like Rudy Gobert, explains the intricacies of how the mental aspect of games can positively or negatively affect how a player’s career development goes.
Not all the speakers were sports medicine related. Hannah Heiring of the Golden State Warriors works as a data scientist, and Eric Leidersdorf is the Director of Biomechanics at the prominent P3 Peak Performance Project, but they were all related to using data metrics like forecasting the best ways to predict potential injury.
