For decades, coaches have trained female athletes the same way they train male athletes — or worse, held them back entirely out of myth and misunderstanding. In this episode of the GAINcast, Vern Gambetta sits down with Morgan Smith, senior performance coach for US Soccer’s women’s youth national teams and former Stanford post-doctoral researcher, to tackle what we actually know about training the female athlete.
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As coaches we like to think of the training process as predictable and controllable, but the reality isn’t that straightfoward. As guest Dan Cleather explains on this week’s GAINcast, we don’t dictate training outcomes, we simply guide a conversation with the body. In the interview he looks at how to best guide that process, the role of overload, and rethinking recent trends in athlete profiling.
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Vern is a prodigious reader. On this week’s GAINcast he discusses what makes his top 10 books of 2025 stand out, as well as some additional reading recommendations.
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Southern California is known for its earthquakes, but it was also the epicenter of track and field during the golden age of the sport. On this week’s episode, longtime coach and author Larry Knuth looks back at the coaching scene in that era, reflecting on his own path to coaching, as well as the big names he worked with along the way. This episode isn’t just a walk down memory lane, but a look inside how some of the century’s top coaches got their start and developed their broad skillsets.
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This is a story of my college education, a great majority of which occurred outside the classroom on the football field and working in the ag unit doing manual labor. Let’s start with where it all began.
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Of late I have been thinking about those who have influenced me over the course of my career. Below I have listed the people in four categories: teachers/professors, coaches, sport scientists, and athletes. Some of these people I have been able to work directly with, some I just learned from through reading their writing and some through observation. Read more
Sports biomechanics came to age in the 1960s and 1970s with scientists like Betty Atwater at the forefront of this new field. A lot has changed in sports science over the last 50 years, but many of the foundational findings still hold and there is a lot we can learn from the analytical and technical processes used by the trailblazers of biomechanics. On this week’s GAINcast Atwater joins to discussion some of her landmark research on pitching and sprinting, as well as the work that led to it. Read more
It is so important to know history, especially in today’s climate of instant information. Historical context is all important. Many training concepts and methods being practiced and promoted commercially are 50, 60, 70 years old or even older. Historical perspective gives a clearer direction on what you are doing now or what you are planning to do. Certainly, we can learn how these concepts and methods were previously used, what worked and what did not work and most importantly why. Often these methods fell out of favor for various reasons, it is helpful to know why. History can tell us that. Understanding those reasons will help us to avoid repeating mistakes. Read more
It was spring 1968. I was a young idealistic 21-year-old student at Fresno State in the second semester of my senior year. I was a social science major. The Fresno community and Fresno State were very conservative, in many ways isolated and insulated from the turmoil that was growing in spring of 1968. There were no protests. Fraternities and sororities were big. Read more
These are my picks for the best books I read in 2019. As you can see I am light of sport and heavy on history and biography. Read more
