The Duke men’s lacrosse team advanced to the 2023 national championship game, features a generational scorer, fields All-Americans at nearly every position and is led by a Hall of Fame head coach. But it just might be the collaboration between a quartet of behind-the-scenes staff members who can give the Blue Devils the slightest edge they need as they prepare to vie for another ACC title and NCAA Tournament run.
Games can be won or lost by the slimmest of margins, the width of a crossbar or one slip of the foot. It’s often the attention to the smallest of details that decides the outcome and that’s where the work from those within Duke’s sports science, nutrition, sports performance and athletic training departments comes in. 
Carl Christensen (associate director of sports performance), Joe Ferraro (assistant director of athletic medicine), Kerrin Meseck (assistant director of sports nutrition) and Jon Sedy (sports science fellow) each have unique roles within the lacrosse program, but at the same time share great overlap. Constant communication amongst each other and consistent messaging to coaches and athletes are paramount to them being effective as a group and the Blue Devils finding success on the field. 
“None of this can be done in a silo,” said Meseck. “And I think as the season goes on and you get in really hard stretches it can be really easy (for each of us) to put our heads down and go into our lanes, but that won’t work.”
Sedy and Meseck, both in their second years with the men’s lacrosse team, are the two newest members of the support staff and they have brought with them new tools for everyone to put in their toolboxes. 
“With Jon Sedy here, I’ve become more understanding of the rigors of how much the guys really do (in practice and games) and he’s able to show me hard data to help me understand it,” said Christensen. 
“So, me being more understanding will help me have the guys at their best on gameday. (It’s about) what can I do? What can we do to help them be at their best that day?”
Sports science is where technology meets sport, allowing athletes and coaches alike to understand what adjustments might need to be made based on data collected on each athlete from every practice and game. 
“First and foremost, when people hear sports science, they hopefully think technology,” said Sedy. “So, managing the technology we use within the sport is a huge piece of it. It’s about finding that next little percent to improve. So, for this team we’re fortunate to be pretty darn good and have good coaches. But then it just gets to the point you’re just searching for that little something extra. Can we tweak something in the weight room? Can we tweak something in the way we prepare throughout the weeks? It’s managing the data we collect on the guys to make those one to two percent tweaks.”
In their second full season of utilizing the Catapult One system, which provides data of the players’ workloads, speeds and intensity after every practice and game, both the athletes and coaches are understanding the importance of not only tracking the numbers but comprehending what they mean and how they translate to what they’re doing every day in practice. 
“I think athlete-wise a better understanding I’ve seen so far is the long range of what we’re trying to do here,” Sedy said. “For a long time, their focus was to put on their Catapult GPS unit every day and that was their check of the box. Now they are starting to understand more of why they are doing it every day and the actual effects of week-to-week and season-to-season of why we’re doing it.”
In fact, after looking and digesting last year’s data and with advice from Sedy and Ferraro, who hears directly from the athletes about how their bodies feel, head coach John Danowski and the Blue Devils adjusted their practice plans this season. 
They’ve started “Fast Thursdays” before Saturday games, which features a high intensity but short practice with no pads to get their nervous systems firing. Friday is about slowing down and buttoning up the on-the-field details in preparation for gameday. 
In weeks with multiple games, there is a special focus on the data from each game and how to organize both practices and workouts in the weight room on the between days so the athletes can still be at their biggest, fastest and strongest. 
The team completed a stretch of three games in eight days earlier this season, and with consistent communication between Sedy, Christensen, Ferraro and the players, the team still found ways to hit the weight room twice. 
“Keep them in the weight room and win games,” Christensen said about his goal during a stretch of eight games in 28 days. “(Sedy said it well) in that you’re replacing a hard practice with a game. So even this week with two games we still got our two lifts in. It’s about how can we still try to be our best physically even if we are playing all these games.”
Knowing how many accelerations and decelerations a player had in a game or how many long-distance sprints a player ran is great, but knowing those numbers won’t matter if the players aren’t also taking care of business off the field when it comes to fueling their bodies and recovering properly.
“We both do similar things, but our data sets are different so there’s a lot of overlap within that,” Sedy said about he and Meseck needing to be in constant communication. “So, when I talk about ‘How can we get one percent better?’ that one percent might actually be checking our body weights and making sure our guys know how to recover after the game and a lot of that then falls into Kerrin’s lap.”
This is where Meseck jumps into the fray. As a member of Duke’s nutrition staff, Meseck focuses on the overall health and wellness of Duke student-athletes and how she can help them understand the fundamentals of nutrition as a college athlete. 
“I like to think of my role more as general health and wellness than performance most of the time,” said Meseck. “I think as college student-athletes there is a lot of pressure to do things perfectly so what I like to do in my talks is to zoom out and think ‘What are the fundamentals I can do with nutrition in terms of adequacy, hydration, etc.?’ If I can simplify nutrition and have them research less and go down fewer rabbit holes, then I’m doing my job.”
Two of the slight changes Sedy and Meseck collaborated on making this season were tracking the players’ weights and having them jump on the force plate throughout the spring. They are elite athletes and training as such oftentimes makes it challenging to maintain all the work they did with Christensen in the weight room in the fall.
Consistently weighing the athletes and having them test their explosiveness on the force plates allows for Sedy and Meseck to hit the athletes from all angles about what and why they need to recover from not only games but after every practice. Meseck provides education and tools and Sedy backs her up with the numbers — like the proof is in the “pudding.”  
“How I see it play out is my part for the guys is the application they don’t think about, and Jon (Sedy) is the one who shows them ‘This is why it matters, and this is how it’s impacting you.’ Sometimes when we talk about nutrition you don’t get the data, you don’t get the tangible. So, as intelligent of a group as they are, Jon is bringing the why and I can tell them ‘Remember what I said here – this is how this plays out for you.’”
The force plates offer similar feedback for the athletes. With a baseline jump set in the fall — likely when they are at their biggest, fastest, strongest — they are tested a couple of days after a game to see how much explosiveness they lost during the contest. From this information, Sedy, Christensen, Meseck and Ferraro can come together and give input to the coaching staff about what certain athletes might need that week when it comes to practice intensity. 
“(Jumping on the force plates) is a very simple test. What you’ll find is your fastest kids, your most athletic kids jump the highest and jump really well, so being able to get a picture of how they jump and the characteristics that make them jump well is important. We know you’re going to be decreased after playing a game. If that is the case, then we’ll test you again later in the week and see via our practice plan — Did we keep running you into the dirt after that game or were we able to pick you back up and are you back to that baseline level of your output?”
While the quartet’s daily work is crucial to discovering that tiny advantage over opponents, the lynchpin to this entire operation is Danowski. Without the longtime leader’s willingness to adapt and embrace technology and modern methods there would be no need for Sedy or Meseck. 
It hasn’t always been an easy road. Change is hard and Danowski, in his 42nd year as a head coach, needed to adjust some of the ways that won him over 400 games, multiple ACC titles and three national championships. Through persistence by Ferraro, who understood the need to demonstrate to Danowski through actual data how hard the players were working every day, the Blue Devils finally found their man in Sedy. 
The addition of Sedy has only elevated the Blue Devils program by providing Danowski, who already is considered the standard by many, with another weapon in his arsenal. Danowski recently reflected on how Sedy has influenced how he’s changed his approach to coaching.
He now understands a player like Tewaaraton Award winner Brennan O’Neill, who is a powerful 6-2 and 250 pounds, could need a little more time to recover. Or someone like Andrew McAdorey, who goes full throttle 100 percent of the time, might need to take a play off at practice some of the time for his and the team’s long-term success.
Perhaps most importantly is Danowski’s increased level of engagement with the modern technology. At one of the Sedy’s 10-minute “Sports Science Thursday” education sessions with the team, Danowski was fascinated by some of the information the Oregon native provided. And perhaps the most important by-product of the group’s work off the field are the questions they get asked. 
“I think the questions the coaches have asked have been more and more pointed,” Sedy said about how his role has evolved in his second year. “The questions I get now tell me they understand what our capabilities are. It’s made my job a little bit easier, but it’s also them understanding what we’re doing more and more, and how we can do better for them.”
Meseck echoes the growth in questions from a player perspective. The information is starting to sink in – just in time. 
For the athletes I’ve seen a lot more — in my one-on-one meetings — more intelligent questions and less of what can I do right now and more long-term questions,” Meseck said. “In the beginning I would get ‘I saw this special thing to do, should I do this?’ Now I’m getting a lot more ‘What should I be doing day in and day out?’ That tells me they’re getting it.”
Sitting at 11-3 and ranked second nationally, the data both on and off the stat sheets proves that what they’ve done has worked. With rival UNC awaiting to close out the regular season and the postseason to follow, the performance data might change, but the group’s mission remains the same. 
Communicate, educate, focus on the fundamentals and WIN.
This story originally appeared in the 15.8 issue of GoDuke The Magazine – March 2024. Dedicated to sharing the stories of Duke student-athletes, present and past, GoDuke The Magazine is published for Duke Athletics by LEARFIELD with editorial offices at 3100 Tower Blvd., Suite 404, Durham, NC 27707.  To subscribe, join the Iron Dukes or call (336) 831-0767.
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