Latest news with #JeremyClark
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Kings have a fight coach. He's one of many specialists helping their playoff drive
Kings player development coach Jeremy Clark, right, works with prospect Koehn Ziemmer during a development camp. The team describes Clark as a "confidence" and "toughness" coach, one of many specialists the team utilizes. (Gary A. Vasquez / NHLI via Getty Images) The Kings' practice rink in El Segundo is empty save for two men circling each other near the blue line, ready to fight. One, roughly the size and shape of a small vending machine, is in street clothes while the other towers over him in skates and a white-and-black hockey sweater. Advertisement If they come to blows it will be a mismatch, especially since the taller guy is wearing a helmet and carrying a stick. But teaching players to defend themselves in situations like this is kind of the point. The heavily muscled man in street clothes is Jeremy Clark, a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu who the players all call the fight coach. And the first rule of fight coach is don't talk about the fight coach. At least not in those terms. Read more: With playoffs looming, Kings end regular season matching franchise records for points, wins 'He's our confidence coach,' Glen Murray, the director of player development for the playoff-bound Kings, says of the man who teaches the team to fight. Advertisement 'We prefer to call him our toughness coach,' a team spokesperson said. As for what Clark prefers to call himself, that's not known because the second rule of fight coach is no one is allowed to talk to the fight coach. But whatever you call him, Clark, the owner of a crossfit and combat-training gym in Minnesota, is a key part of a player-development program that has left no idea unexplored if it has a chance to make the Kings better. So in addition to a confidence coach, the team has four strength and conditioning coaches, a sports dietitian, a psychologist, a skating coach, a video coordinator and a director of goaltending. There are specialists who work on shooting and others who work on face-offs. Add it all up and the Kings have more player-development people, about two dozen in all, than they have players. And that doesn't count the four coaches the team puts behind the bench each game. Kings coach Jim Hiller talks to his players during a game against the Florida Panthers in January. (Marta Lavandier / Associated Press) It's an expensive commitment, one few other teams in the NHL have tried to match. But with the line separating the top teams from the also-rans getting thinner and thinner, it's an investment that helped the Kings match single-season franchise records for wins (48) and points (105) this year while claiming the home-ice advantage for the first round of the playoffs. They'll open the postseason Monday at Arena against the Edmonton Oilers, the team that eliminated them in the first round each of the last three seasons. Advertisement 'This is a necessary expense,' Murray said. 'Ultimately the most important people in the organization are the players and we have to prepare them the best we can with the tools we have. We're going to make sure you have the best of everything to be able to perform.' The process of building out that philosophy began under former general manager Dean Lombardi, who introduced some sports science pieces and other technologies while leading the team to two Stanley Cups. 'He always talked about gaining that extra 3%. Trying to make the team better,' said Bill Ranford, the director of goaltending for the Kings, a job Ranford estimates just a half-dozen NHL teams have. 'Teams are always looking for that edge.' Bill Ranford, the Kings' director of goaltending, speaks with Kings prospect Hampton Slukynsky during development camp. (Gary A. Vasquez / NHLI via Getty Images) But chasing that edge became a priority under Rob Blake, who replaced Lombardi prior to the 2017-18 season. Among his first moves was promoting Murray. Advertisement 'Rob's fairly calculated. He's patient, methodical. But when there's clear evidence that we need to make changes to add or to grow, he's never hesitated,' Matt Price, the Kings' director of strength and performance science, said of Blake, who has taken heat from fans over his roster decisions but has proven a visionary with many of the things he's pushed off the ice. Price has seen his department triple in size under Blake, adding a full-time dietitian, two additional strength coaches, and a dietitian and strength coach for the team's AHL affiliate in Ontario. 'We have player-tracking data that gets collected every day that needs to be analyzed and processed and presented. There's a mountain of information that gets collected every day,' Price said. 'So it's just sort of the evolution of the NHL, the Kings sort of being early adopters of this. We've really been at the tip of the spear on a lot of these things.' Murray estimates the overall investment in strength and nutrition alone at 'well over $1 million' a season, a bargain considering what that investment has bought. Advertisement 'The sort of feeling is, maybe the work we do for the course of 82 games gets us three points,' said Price, who is in his 11th season with the Kings. 'It could be how we handle players on the second night of a back-to-back and we got that game to overtime and we got the point. It could be a decision that's made with the coaching staff how to manage load.' Or it could be what Price and the team's medical staff did to get future Hall of Fame defenseman Drew Doughty back from a broken ankle in just four months. 'Across a long season there's so much actionable data that somewhere in there, we feel we've banked a few points,' Price said. Kari Oliver, who joined the team as its sports dietitian midway through the 2020-21 season, said few teams in the NHL offer the kind of nutrition support the Kings do. Oliver, who also manages the players' dietary supplements and lab work, has a culinary staff of more than a half-dozen, including two sous chefs at the team's El Segundo practice facility, where players are served two individually tailored meals and a recovery shake every day the team is there. Advertisement 'Nutrition is massive nowadays,' Murray said. 'Some kids have no clue what they're supposed to eat and how much and what gives them more energy. I'm surprised not every team has it. We're lucky.' To make sure the players don't stray from their diets, Oliver plans and oversees every meal players receive from the team, including the food served on the team's charter flights. 'I feel like I'm planning a wedding every single time that we go on a road trip,' she said. 'Even if we go out to a restaurant as a team — we do that often in the playoffs — I'll go ahead to the restaurant and make sure everything's set up exactly how we want it. I work with every hotel we stay at and send them menus.' Advertisement She said she gains an appreciation for just how different the team's support program is every time a new player arrives. 'They tell us their experience [else]where,' said Oliver, who has taken players on supermarket visits and given them cooking demonstrations as part of their nutrition education. 'When they get here I'll sit down with them and kind of just rapid fire try to figure out a profile of them from a nutrition standpoint.' One of this season's converts is goaltender Darcy Kuemper, who played half a season with the Kings shortly after Blake took over, then was traded back to the team last summer. The difference between then and now, he said, was dramatic and he credits Oliver, Price, Ranford and the rest of the sprawling support staff with helping him to the best season of his career. Kings forward Kevin Fiala celebrates with teammates after scoring during a win over the Edmonton Oilers on April 14. The two teams will meet again in the first round of the playoffs, starting Monday. (Andy Devlin / NHLI via Getty Images) 'You see the different people they have in place, whether it's nutrition, strength. From an organizational standpoint, they want to give us all the tools so that we have everything we need to [be] the best version of yourself,' said Kuemper, whose goals-against average of 2.02 was second-best among regular goalkeepers this season. 'So there's no excuses but to go out and perform.' Advertisement One reason the Kings' approach succeeds is the support staff, like the team on the ice, know their roles and they stay in their lanes. But they also complement one another and quietly share the credit for the team's success. 'We want to do our job but we don't make a lot of fanfare out of what we do,' Oliver said. 'We just want to make sure that we're giving them really good resources and kind of staying behind the scenes.' 'We're here to maximize potential. And, for the most part, players see this as a significant help,' Price added. 'They see this as something that can really boost their performance. They all know better performance equals bigger contracts. Better performance means more wins.' Credit Blake for finding a way to squeeze out those extra wins. 'The difference between doing nothing and doing something,' Price added 'is a pretty big gap.' This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
21-04-2025
- Sport
- Los Angeles Times
Kings have a fight coach. He's one of many specialists helping their playoff drive
The Kings' practice rink in El Segundo is empty save for two men circling each other near the blue line, ready to fight. One, roughly the size and shape of a small vending machine, is in street clothes while the other towers over him in skates and a white-and-black hockey sweater. If they come to blows it will be a mismatch, especially since the taller guy is wearing a helmet and carrying a stick. But teaching players to defend themselves in situations like this is kind of the point. The heavily muscled man in street clothes is Jeremy Clark, a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu who the players all call the fight coach. And the first rule of fight coach is don't talk about the fight coach. At least not in those terms. 'He's our confidence coach,' Glen Murray, the director of player development for the playoff-bound Kings, says of the man who teaches the team to fight. 'We prefer to call him our toughness coach,' a team spokesperson said. As for what Clark prefers to call himself, that's not known because the second rule of fight coach is no one is allowed to talk to the fight coach. But whatever you call him, Clark, the owner of a crossfit and combat-training gym in Minnesota, is a key part of a player-development program that has left no idea unexplored if it has a chance to make the Kings better. So in addition to a confidence coach, the team has four strength and conditioning coaches, a sports dietitian, a psychologist, a skating coach, a video coordinator and a director of goaltending. There are specialists who work on shooting and others who work on face-offs. Add it all up and the Kings have more player-development people, about two dozen in all, than they have players. And that doesn't count the four coaches the team puts behind the bench each game. It's an expensive commitment, one few other teams in the NHL have tried to match. But with the line separating the top teams from the also-rans getting thinner and thinner, it's an investment that helped the Kings match single-season franchise records for wins (48) and points (105) this year while claiming the home-ice advantage for the first round of the playoffs. They'll open the postseason Monday at Arena against the Edmonton Oilers, the team that eliminated them in the first round each of the last three seasons. 'This is a necessary expense,' Murray said. 'Ultimately the most important people in the organization are the players and we have to prepare them the best we can with the tools we have. We're going to make sure you have the best of everything to be able to perform.' The process of building out that philosophy began under former general manager Dean Lombardi, who introduced some sports science pieces and other technologies while leading the team to two Stanley Cups. 'He always talked about gaining that extra 3%. Trying to make the team better,' said Bill Ranford, the director of goaltending for the Kings, a job Ranford estimates just a half-dozen NHL teams have. 'Teams are always looking for that edge.' But chasing that edge became a priority under Rob Blake, who replaced Lombardi prior to the 2017-18 season. Among his first moves was promoting Murray. 'Rob's fairly calculated. He's patient, methodical. But when there's clear evidence that we need to make changes to add or to grow, he's never hesitated,' Matt Price, the Kings' director of strength and performance science, said of Blake, who has taken heat from fans over his roster decisions but has proven a visionary with many of the things he's pushed off the ice. Price has seen his department triple in size under Blake, adding a full-time dietitian, two additional strength coaches, and a dietitian and strength coach for the team's AHL affiliate in Ontario. 'We have player-tracking data that gets collected every day that needs to be analyzed and processed and presented. There's a mountain of information that gets collected every day,' Price said. 'So it's just sort of the evolution of the NHL, the Kings sort of being early adopters of this. We've really been at the tip of the spear on a lot of these things.' Murray estimates the overall investment in strength and nutrition alone at 'well over $1 million' a season, a bargain considering what that investment has bought. 'The sort of feeling is, maybe the work we do for the course of 82 games gets us three points,' said Price, who is in his 11th season with the Kings. 'It could be how we handle players on the second night of a back-to-back and we got that game to overtime and we got the point. It could be a decision that's made with the coaching staff how to manage load.' Or it could be what Price and the team's medical staff did to get future Hall of Fame defenseman Drew Doughty back from a broken ankle in just four months. 'Across a long season there's so much actionable data that somewhere in there, we feel we've banked a few points,' Price said. Kari Oliver, who joined the team as its sports dietitian midway through the 2020-21 season, said few teams in the NHL offer the kind of nutrition support the Kings do. Oliver, who also manages the players' dietary supplements and lab work, has a culinary staff of more than a half-dozen, including two sous chefs at the team's El Segundo practice facility, where players are served two individually tailored meals and a recovery shake every day the team is there. 'Nutrition is massive nowadays,' Murray said. 'Some kids have no clue what they're supposed to eat and how much and what gives them more energy. I'm surprised not every team has it. We're lucky.' To make sure the players don't stray from their diets, Oliver plans and oversees every meal players receive from the team, including the food served on the team's charter flights. 'I feel like I'm planning a wedding every single time that we go on a road trip,' she said. 'Even if we go out to a restaurant as a team — we do that often in the playoffs — I'll go ahead to the restaurant and make sure everything's set up exactly how we want it. I work with every hotel we stay at and send them menus.' She said she gains an appreciation for just how different the team's support program is every time a new player arrives. 'They tell us their experience [else]where,' said Oliver, who has taken players on supermarket visits and given them cooking demonstrations as part of their nutrition education. 'When they get here I'll sit down with them and kind of just rapid fire try to figure out a profile of them from a nutrition standpoint.' One of this season's converts is goaltender Darcy Kuemper, who played half a season with the Kings shortly after Blake took over, then was traded back to the team last summer. The difference between then and now, he said, was dramatic and he credits Oliver, Price, Ranford and the rest of the sprawling support staff with helping him to the best season of his career. 'You see the different people they have in place, whether it's nutrition, strength. From an organizational standpoint, they want to give us all the tools so that we have everything we need to [be] the best version of yourself,' said Kuemper, whose goals-against average of 2.02 was second-best among regular goalkeepers this season. 'So there's no excuses but to go out and perform.' One reason the Kings' approach succeeds is the support staff, like the team on the ice, know their roles and they stay in their lanes. But they also complement one another and quietly share the credit for the team's success. 'We want to do our job but we don't make a lot of fanfare out of what we do,' Oliver said. 'We just want to make sure that we're giving them really good resources and kind of staying behind the scenes.' 'We're here to maximize potential. And, for the most part, players see this as a significant help,' Price added. 'They see this as something that can really boost their performance. They all know better performance equals bigger contracts. Better performance means more wins.' Credit Blake for finding a way to squeeze out those extra wins. 'The difference between doing nothing and doing something,' Price added 'is a pretty big gap.'
USA Today
09-02-2025
- Health
- USA Today
Wanted: Candidates for municipal election
Wanted: Candidates for municipal election | Voice of the People (Feb. 9, 2025) Wanted: Candidates for Davenport Election When the City of Davenport had an 'election' in 2023, no one in my community appeared to have known about it. As a result, the board got to appoint its third commissioner in just five years. Did you know that the majority of our commissioners got onto the board originally by appointment, not by the votes of the people? Mayor Brynn Summerlin was appointed in 2018, Vice Mayor Jeremy Clark was appointed in 2020, and Donna Fellows-Coffey, daughter of local political careerist and former Commissioner Tom Fellows, was appointed in 2023. (In 2023, Summerlin was 'voted' into his mayorship because no one else ran, because nobody knew. Then, due to incumbent advantage, Clark won his last election by about 100 votes in 2024.) In slightly over two months, it will be election day for Davenport. It would be nice if we actually had an election. (You know, with candidates. Plural.) If you live within the city limits, please consider running for office. The democracy of our city of 20,000-plus and, of course, our larger democratic republic need you. Darhlene Zeanwick, Davenport (Editor's note: Qualifying for the Davenport municipal election ends Feb. 14. See when the qualifying periods are for each municipality here.) Voice of the People (Feb. 2, 2025) Not listening to reason on Thompson Nursery Road With state in dental health crisis, why stop fluoridation? Access to affordable oral care is a challenge for many Floridians. In fact, 65 of 67 Florida counties are designated as Dental Health Professional Shortage Areas, affecting more than 7 million Floridians. This means that for many, access to dental care is mainly through visits to the emergency room where they receive antibiotics and pain medicine but no treatment for the underlying cause. Florida hospitals charged almost half a billion dollars in 2021 for the treatment of preventable dental issues. For children, failure to treat dental problems means frequent absences from school or poor performance due to chronic pain. There are also social and emotional consequences such as bullying, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem. No wonder some have called the lack of access in our state a 'dental health crisis.' The issue of access to oral health care is vital when contemplating the current fluoride debate. Adding fluoride to the water supply up to the recommended level of 0.7 mg/L helps to level the playing field by mitigating disparities around access to affordable dental care. Let's continue to reduce cavities for all Lakeland residents, especially children and low-income families, by continuing to fluoridate city water. Robert Chapman, Lakeland Voice of the People (Jan. 26, 2024) It's supposed to be 'protect' and serve Jan. 6 pardons undermine justice system and rule of law The Trump 'shock and awe' approach leaves many of us who don't agree with the policies with an overwhelming agenda of what to do next. So many things on which to make our voices heard. News that upsets us today is old news next month – unless we keep fighting it. My priority today is the despicable pardon for the January 6 insurrectionists (Jan. 6 charges dismissed against Jonathan Pollock, Jan. 22.) This man assaulted police officers at the Capitol in defiance of our democratic institutions and the peaceful transfer of power. He is not being held accountable for his crimes. That undermines our rule of law and our system of justice. Why are the Congressmen who feared for their lives at that moment now willing to let Trump reward his violent loyalists with a free pass? Most Americans were infuriated by the events of Jan. 6. The pardons of the perpetrators should be equally infuriating. Katherine Sutherland, Winter Haven Voice of the People (Jan. 19, 2025) What can we expect under Trump's royal reign? Hold Trump accountable for his promises No one likes paying taxes, but the simple truth is there is no free lunch. More than 20% of our federal budget is borrowed money. When our government borrows money, it competes with people like you and me for available funds in the debt market. The higher the demand, the higher the interest rates we will pay to buy a home, car, insurance or use our credit card. Interest paid is money not available for other priorities. Many people are food insecure, often have health issues, some become homeless. It's inflationary, increases our burdens and weakens our team. It's cost shifting. We are the sum of our parts. We want a winning, competitive team, and we are competing against the rest of the world to be a leading industrialized nation. Growing debt handicaps our team and our ability to maintain a healthy, educated lifestyle. President Trump is our new president. He made many promises, people trusted and voted for him, and he is now walking back some of his promises. We should be paying attention, (promise made — promise kept) holding his feet to the fire and asking the question: 'Will we be better off in four years, or have we been played?' Robert Connors, Lakeland Voice of the People (Jan. 12, 2025) Fluoride in water: Lakeland looking for the facts Lessons learned from Trump Anyone who thinks Americans, and the world, have not learned anything from Donald Trump, think again. Most people did not know convicted felons were eligible to be president of the United States. Many never thought a man who was found liable for the defamation and sexual abuse of a woman could win a presidential election. Whoever believed a five-time draft-dodger could become the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces? Most Americans supposed it took years, even decades, to get a case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court; however, Donald Trump proved that the wealthy and powerful have different access to the judicial system than 'regular' Americans. Trump taught all Americans that 'liberty and justice for all' is an American myth. Trump taught us that people will make up reasons to ignore facts to achieve their desired outcome. Trump proved if you repeat lies often enough, and do not deviate an iota from your lies, your lies will become facts for a huge swath of the population that are incapable of critical thinking. So, as America celebrates the re-election of Donald Trump, let us all thank him for the lessons he taught us, our children, the world, and future generations. Michael Schwam, Lakeland Want to contribute? Send letters to the editor to voice@ or Voice of the People, P.O. Box 408, Lakeland, FL, 33802. Submit on the website at or go to click on the menu arrow at the top of the website and click Submit a Letter. Letters must be 200 words or less and meet standards of decency and taste.
