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Case-Study-Puff-BerkeleyThe Client – University of California, Berkeley

UC Berkeley is an iconic global brand, recognized for academic and sporting excellence and had a highly successful athletic department with 30 athletic programs, an annual budget of $90m and responsibility for 1200 people.

The Challenge

The Intercollegiate athletic department of UC Berkeley (Cal) wanted a long-term high performance solution that would address four key areas.

  1. To provide competitive advantage for its athletic teams
  2. Second, to provide a World Class experience for its student athletes
  3. Third, to build more efficient performance systems and process within the athletic department
  4. The needs of a $150 million High Performance Center

The Integrated Solution

Keith Power was appointed as High Performance Director and working with his associates focused on four key areas:

  1. Organizational development—helping the department and each program to be excellent in planning, organization, and leadership/management, as well as develop a high performance culture. The project also included working with all key internal and external stakeholders.
  2. Providing expertise in coaching science, learning and development – working with department leaders, managers, head and assistant coaches to advance their programs and advance their coaching knowledge and abilities. This also included advising on talent identification, talent development and recruiting.
  3. Leading, managing and integrating strength and conditioning, sports science, sports medicine and lifestyle management per se across the department, but also within each of the 30 sports programs.
  4. Helping design the Student Athlete High Performance Center – a $150 million investment

 Sustained Outcomes

  1. Organizational Design
  • Provided expertise to the Athletic Director and Leadership team on all aspects of organizational learning and the implementation and development of a high performance culture strategy
  • Maximized departmental efficiencies, student athlete experience and competitive advantage by making large scale organizational and system and process changes across the department
  • High Performance reviews with a number of departmental units e.g. business office, ticket office, equipment room and communications. This led to greater efficiencies, working practices and performance in these units and thus the department as a whole.
  • Helped to advance and improve the performance management system across the entire department using KPI’s
  • Design and Implementation of a highly successful performance management system of each of the 30 sports programs using KPI’s
  • Efficiently managed a multi – million dollar budget and absorbed and managed significant budget and resource reductions during a major financial crisis
  1. Learning, Coaching and High Performance Program Design
  • A key aspect of my work with Head Coaches was developing sport by sport talent identification and talent development plans as well as recruitment strategies for each program
  • Design and Implementation of a highly successful performance management system for all 80 coaches without parallel in collegiate and professional sport in the USA
  • The establishment of an individualized coach learning and development system unlike any in collegiate sport
  • The establishment of monthly coaching master classes, online coaching learning and development platform and coaching retreats which promoted best practice cross sport coach learning – revolutionary for collegiate sport
  • Grew the performance team meeting system from 10% to 80% efficient usage
  • Implemented a High Performance Plan system and process across all 29 sports which radically improved communication and collaboration and which is without comparison in collegiate sport
  1. Sport Science, Sports Medicine, Strength and Conditioning and Lifestyle Management
  • Successfully lead and managed an interdisciplinary team of 40 plus staff
  • Group and individualized learning and development programs for all my 40 support staff
  • Designed a highly cost effective performance psychology support program which in 4 years went from providing support for less than 50 student athletes to over 600 student athletes
  • Implemented a cutting edge performance lifestyle support program for all student athletes and coaches
  • Designed a pilot program regarding “Cloud based” performance logs where student-athletes can report sleep, academic load, stress, and perceived training loads
  • Implemented a pilot program regarding heart rate recovery tests (HRRT) and IGA (Immunoglobulin) “real time” collection to monitor training responses and adjust training load
  • Pilot program development of a sports IT platform for every program in which there is a one-stop shop for data analysis and monitoring of all aspects of student-athlete performance.
  • Created best practice fitness testing protocols for all ‘invasion’ based sports

“Keith Power’s full range of knowledge and expertise in coaching, organizational development and a wide knowledge of sports sciences are unmatched in our collegiate environment. In addition to his content expertise, Keith’s experience as a world-class athlete provides him a distinctive perspective and credibility. In his role, he has had the opportunity to motivate and lead some of the top professionals in elite athletic performance.

The University of California’s Intercollegiate Athletics Department, when measured by the success of all of its men’s and women’s sports programs, was ranked as one of the top in the county. Keith Power’s leadership, academic and professional expertise were an important part of achieving that result. “

Sandy Barbour- University of California, Berkeley (Cal Athletics), Athletic Director

Cal Case Study