The ADM athletic department shuffled the deck over the summer as it pertains to strength and conditioning and injury management.

Absolute Performance Therapy was retained as the department’s official injury treatment partner, but that company’s association with ADM athletics as the primary source for sports performance programs has changed.

ADM hired an in-house strength trainer to work with various athletes and teams in order to consolidate. Alyssa Subbert is owner of Absolute Performance Therapy and in the two years prior to the reorganization of the athletic department’s strength and injury management programs, wrote sport-specific workouts at coaches’ requests.

Subbert takes a unique approach in writing workout programs because of her background in injury prevention, motivated in part by a torn ACL she suffered her senior year of high school.

The results this past year were encouraging: Subbert said there were major injuries suffered in basketball – no severe ankle sprains, ACL tears, MCL tears, etc.  The most significant injury to an ADM athlete Absolute deal with was senior Blake Crannell’s ACL tear toward the end of the 2014 season.

“When I write sports performance programs, it’s a lot of single leg. In fact, it’s 90 percent single leg, single arm, lots of rotation,” Subbert said. “And so again, that’s a little bit different thinking than traditional, Olympic lifting, certified strength conditioning mantra.”

That means certain teams and their coaches are more receptive to her style of athletic performance training than others.

“And so we had really good buy-in from coaches who wanted a lot of speed and a lot of reaction time – [boys basketball head] coach [Aaron] Mager, the track coaches, the soccer coaches – they were all in because their sports demand a lot of reaction.” Subbert said. “Whereas when it’s more traditional football-style lifting … you need more time to overcome the traditional concepts. Football was a little less ‘jump on the bandwagon,’ just because there’s a way football has always trained, everywhere, for 100 years, so it takes a little longer to win them over.”