Photograph courtesy Jason Stone
After years of experience helping professional and college sports teams with sport science, data, and athletic performance, Jason Stone has taken a new position with the Bearcats. As the new (and first) director of sport science at the University of Cincinnati, he hopes to bring an element of coordination and efficiency to Bearcats Football. Cincinnati Magazine sat down with Stone to discuss his experience in sport science and how it will serve UC football in its upcoming season.
What led you into sport science and to Cincinnati?
I am originally from southwest Ohio. I grew up in the Dayton area, [in a] small town called Brookville. I think the first thing I ever remember wanting to do was be a sports broadcaster. I remember playing video games in my room as a kid, and my buddy and I would play the game on mute and pretend like we were Marty Brennaman. I did my undergrad at Miami in Oxford. My dream job, honestly, through that whole period, was to be the team doc for the Reds or the Buckeyes. I went to Texas Christian University, where I did a two-year exercise physiology master’s [program], focusing on a bunch of sports nutrition, sports supplement research, and strength and conditioning research.
One of the guys that I worked with at Wright Patterson Air Force Base was going to West Virginia University to start up this new human performance innovation center that involved a bunch of sport science work with WV Athletics. I hit them up on LinkedIn, and within a couple of weeks, I was signing papers to move to Morgantown, West Virginia. I worked full-time for the first two years, and that’s where I started and finished my Ph.D.
I was not looking for a job and was fortunate enough that there was this opening with the Cincinnati Reds to be their applied sport science coordinator. And like I said, at the onset, working for the Reds was the dream job.
How did your time with the Reds prepare you for your new job at UC?
A baseball organization is huge—it’s almost like a small college. There are 300 athletes within the Reds organization, in five different states and a ton of countries. We have an international academy in the Dominican Republic, where we have players from all over the world. I think that’s why I felt like taking some sort of job in baseball would prepare me even more so for something like this. It was becoming more commonplace for colleges to have positions like my new position here.
What does your new role in Cincinnati involve on a day-to-day basis?
In a nutshell, there were already a bunch of really good systems and operations in place in terms of information workflow. What I feel like I’m being brought in to do and what I’m really excited and feel like I’m well-trained to do is make sure that all of those pieces work horizontally, or cross-departmentally. If we need to obtain the same objective, this is how we’re going to work together to do that—that objective being to get to Dallas and win the Big 12 championship. From a more technical training standpoint, [this is how we’re going] to make sure that our team readiness is peaking at the right times of the season. I’m the information facilitator.
Are these kinds of sport science roles becoming more common in college athletics, or is UC ahead of the curve?
I’d say that it’s pretty commonplace at this point in time. I was at TCU from 2015 to 2018, and a lot of the same technologies I was seeing there, I’m also seeing here. And I also saw at West Virginia and Ohio State and with the Reds, even crossing over to pro sports. But there are more and more tools becoming more and more accessible for more and more populations as the years go on. Where I feel like schools, like Cincinnati, are definitely trying to get ahead of the curve is formalizing these departments and positions entirely within their athletics department.
What kind of data are you collecting, and how does that data guide your work with players?
In simple terms, it’s pretty holistic. The individualized development of each athlete. Just take the offensive line room, for instance. Every one of them is an offensive lineman. Every one of them is going to go through the same offensive line drills together. They’re probably going to lift together a lot. They’re probably going to do similar workouts in the weight room, but every single one of them is going to respond to all those different stimuli differently.
They also go home, and they’re all independent human beings with their own lives, and their own stresses. So at the end of the day, the whole point of all of it is to use the information at our disposal. Both objective, which is more of your measurables and technology-driven stuff, but also subjective, being your intuitions from your coaches, subjective feedback from players, attitudes, and efforts, and leveraging our sports psychology department and all the relationships that our coaches have with the players. Like I said, individualize and contextualize what in the industry is called the fitness fatigue paradigm.
What are the main goals for you and your staff in this role?
The first thing that I thought about is making sure that all of the different systems in place that are leveraging our expertise already across all these different departments, figuring out ways to make them more efficient so that people like our strength coaches and our position coaches are freed up to do more coaching. Like I said, there are already sports technologies in place. Data was getting collected before I was hired. Every single player is wearing a sensor. That involves logistics and management, charging, and syncing the sensors to the data cloud so that we have something to look at. Taking the data out of the cloud to make a report for the coaches.
It’s one thing to make the workflow more efficient, but it doesn’t matter if the data are not actually being applied in a systematic and applicable way to influence training, how we practice, and how we go about certain elements of what we do in the weight room. Everybody has the technology. Everybody has the data. Where I feel like the UC Bearcats football program is actively setting ourselves apart from the rest is what we’re doing with that information and the way that we collaborate, having very transparent and open conversations from the top down and horizontally.
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