David Tenney’s new title at Atlanta United, Director of High Performance, sounds like he could be responsible for everything from motivational phrases to physiology, to diet, to rest, to on-field performance.
Well, you’d be right.
Tenney, whose hire was announced on Monday, and his staff will be responsible for trying to make sure that Atlanta United’s first-teamers, its 2s and its academy players are physically and mentally as prepared as they can be to play as well as they can for 90 minutes.
Tenney, President of the Professional Soccer Performance Association, brings 16 years of experience in this role with MLS teams Kansas City, Seattle and most recently Austin aligning sports science, sports psychology and communication channels to a team looking to win its first trophy since 2019.
“We hope that, and I believe, we will have a team on the field where you will see this physical freshness and this ability to really maintain high outputs when they need to,” he said in an exclusive interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Tenney will work closely with President Garth Lagerwey, whom he worked with for a years at Seattle, and with the new manager on everything from examining the health backgrounds of potential transfer targets, to setting up schedules for traveling to away matches to ensure the players get the proper rest and recovery. Tenney said it’s too soon to know what changes he may make to what the team does now. He is still reviewing and researching.
Tenney’s overall approach, based upon his answers, will be collaborative. He described it as setting guardrails to steer everyone in the same direction. His experience in MLS and in the NBA with Orlando, which came between working at Seattle and Austin, has taught him that each has different preferences. Under previous managers Gonzalo Pineda and Rob Valentino, the team would typically fly out the day before a road match for Eastern Conference matches. It would fly out two days before matches on the West Coast. With the exception of back-to-back road matches played within a few days, the team would always fly back within a few hours of the end of a match. The next day would usually be a rest day, and the day after that would be a light training and regenerative day.
Tenney will have familiar tools to help the staff and the players recover. The $23 million expansion of the team’s training ground in Marietta will include an altitude room where the air is regulated to simulate lower oxygen content levels that happen at higher elevations, and cognitive abilities room where players can improve vision and problem-solving. Austin, one of the places Lagerwey toured when researching the expansion and where Tenney worked, had both rooms.
“You want to have an array of recovery options for these guys, because, again, recovery is such a big piece,” he said. “And oftentimes injuries happen because players are just never fully recovered. You never get to a state where they’re fresh again and feel good about competing in a fresh state. So what we found is, when it comes to things like cryo, sauna, hyperbaric chamber, massage, all these different recovery tools, it’s really trying to have options that every player feels comfortable with.”
Atlanta United has had issues with muscle injuries in two of the past three seasons: hamstrings, quads, hip flexors. Tenney said he hasn’t yet gone over the data to try to determine if there was a commonality to the injuries.
Tenney said there is no factual basis in the belief that playing on artificial turf, which is used at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, leads to a higher rate of injuries than playing on grass. He said playing on turf may be slightly harder on recovery. Tenney said a key is the quality of the turf. Mercedes-Benz changes its turf every 2-3 years.
Tenney said he thinks that teams that play on turf may have an advantage compared to those whose home field is grass.
“Seattle is a good example of it, they look forward to teams coming in and trying to match them on turf, and they kind of run them over, and that’s been a huge home field advantage,” he said. “I think there’s a while between Atlanta, Portland, Seattle, a turf team made the MLS finals several years in a row.”
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