1-On-1: with Parker Poore
Roadrunners Performance Coach Parker Poore joined Jonathon Schaffer and Kim Cota-Robles on this week’s Happy Hour Show. For the complete conversation and to hear about Parker’s Spanish lessons, download this past week’s show below.
Listen to “Performing With Parker” on Spreaker.
What does your day to day look like as the team’s performance coach?
My title would be strength, conditioning and performance coach. I think there’s people who would call it multiple different titles, but I work with our athletes on the off-ice side. The day-to-day training that they do because, even in season, we have the benefit of mirroring more of a college sports schedule than, honestly, an NHL schedule. So that allows us time to train off ice and try to accomplish some goals there. On top of that, I work with anybody in a rehab setting. We’ll usually work back and forth with our physical therapist, Nikki Patel, on when I need to do something versus when she needs to do something when we do injuries and then I would also say that I monitor our players for our sports science that we use in house and then I would finish off by saying on game days I run a Jamba Juice.
You’re in charge of catering for the team, right? Are you the one choosing all the meals?
When we’re here, thankfully, the TCC does a really good job of working with us. We’ve tried to kind of give them a lot of freedom of just hey, here’s your bumpers, if you can stay in that it makes our life a lot easier. There are parts of our day-to-day where as much as a meal may seem repetitive, having the consistency of knowing what you’re getting on a certain day does mean a lot to our guys. At home, Jake Wagman and I both kind of can manage that but I will usually, if a meal is over the top incredible, give them feedback and ask them if we can have more stuff like this or if something you know might not have been loved, it’s pretty rare where we say, “can we avoid these things? When we’re on the road, Jake will send me our menu options, given the place that we’re staying at and we can kind of decide from there and say stay away from this or I’d like to do that. It’s pretty easy when they’re all in templates. So, we don’t have to do a whole lot of work or a whole lot of instructing with the places we go.
What does your pregame routine look like? What time are you getting to the arena?
I would say that I’m probably there more than what is healthy, but it comes with the territory a little bit. I usually won’t leave the rink once we get there, so staff bus or even at home you’re probably getting there around 7:00 or 8:00 AM. A morning skate can be anywhere from 10:00 to 11:00 a.m., anything leading up to that is just making sure that at home our spaces are ready. We have, I would say, kind of like an a la carte menu that we’ll put up on the TV so that guys kind of have options of like, hey, what do you need? Do you need structure, and you want a warmup? Because some guys just want to walk through something. You’re very good at managing yourself, pick three of these five things and make sure that you’re just preparing yourself in a good way. So that gets me through the morning. As soon as that morning skates done is usually when a healthy scratch would come in and workout or an injured player would workout. So, depending on what’s going on, you’ll have those guys train. That really gives you a gap from around 12:00 to 3:00 p.m. is like complete downtime or free time. That’s usually when I can leave and go do something else because I do need to get outside. What I realize quickly is that you’re inside all day and you live in this very sunny place, that sun is energy, it feels good, and it does help to leave. But there’s other days where I’ll stay. I’ll workout myself, I don’t have to feel rushed on anything, but then around 3:00 p.m. is when I’ll start preparing for any of our gameday stuff. So that means putting in our player output tracking devices that we use on more of the sports science side. Or we have about 30 different water bottles, but we have like 4 to 5 pregame drink options that we make, depending on what a player’s needs are or what their wants are and so I’ll prep that, make sure that that’s ready by the time they get here, it’s in their stall ready. Then leading up to game time I’m just watching, seeing if anybody needs anything. There are people that have very steady routines, you don’t have to manage them at all. Also, there are people who before they go for the on-ice warm up I have an off-ice warm up. It’s not mandatory, but if you want something where you don’t have to think and you just want to be able to feel warm leaving, come hang out with me. That’ll lead you into a game where I don’t have to really do anything during the game besides set up the postgame and that’s where you’re just making sure that a guy has some sort of all around proteins, carbs and things like that, ready for them to drink right away. That is important that we have some level of timing to start putting things back into their system or start putting gas back in the tank.
How did you get the position that you have now? Where did you go to school? What did you study?
I went to college for exercise science, I went to a smaller D2 school about 30 minutes outside of Saint Louis. It’s called Lindenwood University. Hockey fans might know it now because it’s turning into an NCAA division 1 hockey program. When I was there, it was already D1 for women, but I went there and did exercise science while I was there. I was fortunate enough my senior year; I was able to get an internship with the St. Louis Blues and I hung out there all summer. That was my first taste of professional hockey. There were only six or eight guys that stayed around for the entire summer, but it was my first taste of what is it like working with not only a pro athlete, but what it is like working with pro hockey. I was learning what I like, what I don’t like. I worked as a student assistant in our strength and conditioning department there as well; where I worked with like three or four different teams. So, I got some exposure of what that job would be like in a college setting, what that setting would be like for professional sports. It was something I had always had interest in with hockey. So school was wrapping up, I still had an internship credit that I wanted to do for school, I had no more classes to take physically in person, so I took advantage of being able to try something different and I actually took an internship at a facility in Phoenix called EXOS. I have an uncle that lives in Phoenix, I stayed out there with him for six months, but at the end of that is when I met a person who used to be our head of strength and conditioning for the Coyotes. I got along with them, and that was kind of like an in if you will, because I stayed around that summer, I helped them out with their stuff, similar to what I did with St. Louis, and just kind of stayed in good contact with them. I eventually got other jobs at other places after that internship and kind of started my career. I ended up always finding my way back to Arizona, staying friends with my network and those guys there. Unbelievable people, and they taught me a lot, but I kind of just was a cockroach and I just never really went away. I was just always hanging around or always available. Thankfully, as we were coming back from COVID that first season, they were promoting Matt Harder, they brought him up and they needed to hire here. I eventually got the job, so I’ve been here since. It’s my fifth season, and it’s a very hectic and chaotic environment, but it’s fun, it’s challenging, it has pressure to it. So, I find that very rewarding.
Your office is in the gym?
Yeah, we call it the junkyard. It’s a blue-collar gym and it’s a blue-collar league, so it’s nice. But yeah, it’s a chain link fence that surrounds our space. We have, thankfully, everything that you would need, our organization from times of Arizona to now with Utah have bought into off ice preparation and off ice training and that makes my life a lot easier, that we don’t have to tell a player that we don’t have that or having to work around things because we don’t have the resources. We’re very fortunate that the space, for what it is, is very good. Having traveled to other teams, and seen their spaces and stuff, you would be surprised of how much other spaces could be smaller or just not as efficient. So, while our space is not a Lamborghini in appearance, it’s definitely a Ford Bronco in appearance, it actually might have Lamborghini under the hood in terms of the engine and everything. So, it’s been nice. A bit of an aggressive example obviously, but it’s enjoyable and I’ve liked it.
Do you keep track of strength and conditioning metrics? Do you know who’s lifting the most or who’s running the fastest?
Yeah, we do. We thankfully have three different ways that we can kind of do it. You might have seen it on video where guys are jumping up and they’re on some type of a plate. It’s called a force plate. We have that, and that helps me account for where we are neurologically. Are we fatigued, or are we ready to go? Most of our guys know what’s normal for them. So, when they come in and they can now start getting on each other, If I can jump higher, or you can jump higher. It creates competition. We have some other things that can help track bar speed or how fast something is for a guy or how slow it might be for a guy, because different guys might need different things at different times and so it is fun when all of a sudden we can create a leaderboard on a day and just say hey, here’s one object who can pick it up the quickest. It might be heavier, but it starts to separate who’s really strong and then can you compete or can you push yourself to do a little more than you can. So, from my side, anything that’s competition based actually makes my job a lot easier. We’re very fortunate to have a couple of those tools.
