247 The Cost of Excellence

John Mayer had just won LMU's first conference championship when he started questioning everything about how he coached. He had a system that worked. He changed it anyway.JP Nerbun sits down with John Mayer, head beach volleyball coach at Loyola Marymount and the 2025 AVCA Nation ...  Show more

Your team meetings tune the car, but practice is the road.JP Nerbun, Betsy Butterick, and Nate Sanderson take on a question a coach brought to JP: what do you do when there is almost no time to build culture outside of practice? Their answer is that practice is where athletes exp ...  Show more

There are a lot of factors that go into greatness, many of which are not obvious. A variety of Olympic and professional athletes tell us how they made it and what they sacrificed to get there. And if you can identify the sport most likely to get a kid into a top college — well ...

A common thread that runs throughout the hundreds of conversations on this podcast is the idea of sacrifice.

In this episode, Jake and Damian explore what the price of high performance really looks like. Although success looks great on the outside, it can come at th ...

Prof. Ross Tucker and host Mike Finch delve into the real facts and stats behind what makes a world class sportsman or woman. Find out if when and where you are born can make a difference to sporting success, whether practice really makes perfect, how early to specialise and if y ...  Show more

Reaching your athletic peak is a laudable goal. But ambition extracts a physical and mental cost. How do you break free from cycles of burnout and injury and fall in love with running again? Today we cover this topic and more with legends Christopher McDougall + Eric Orton. In th ...  Show more