Duke's David Cutcliffe on conditioning
Duke has struggled late in games, and coaches say the team's conditioning level suffered from the pandemic-shortened spring and fall practices. David Cutcliffe explains how the team is using technology to monitor and improve conditioning
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00:00Well, there's no question what you're doing is different because we measure it. We have the
00:07science. We wear these monitors that give us player load, give us velocity, give us explosive
00:16numbers. And you can't hardly match game numbers in a practice. But we measure every practice and
00:25we try to increase that load as we've started back in August. And then my eyes are pretty
00:32well-trained eyes. And I know when we're getting there, when your legs are under you,
00:38but there's that fine line. We did a lot of running back in August, a lot of conditioning
00:43we normally don't have to do. But this team was away 129 days without an organized workout.
00:50So it's a process that's still in place, but we have to practice. We have no choice.
00:58We've got to practice with the kind of quality that you have to have to get better.
01:05And one of the challenges, and I mean, I'm putting the practice schedule together,
01:11is when your numbers get lower, it makes it very much difficult to practice with the kind
01:16of tempo we like. So we are reinventing the wheel a little bit. I'm not surprised. I was
01:23hopeful that we would stay healthy and that we would have a full contingent at practice,
01:29but that's not happened that way. So you got to go kind of the plan B. And I think we will see
01:36this improve hopefully over the next two to three weeks to a level that we're going to hit everything
01:44that we can hit. But we can't wait. We've got to do it now. This week, Virginia Tech, we've got to
01:50put 60 minutes out there to have an opportunity to beat these guys because they're really good.