Elite Strength and Conditioning Coaches as First-Line Users of Sports-Science Technology: Dashboard Workarounds in Time-Constrained Decision-Making

Elite strength and conditioning (S&C) coaches occupy a critical but underexamined position as first-line users of sports-science technology, responsible for translating raw athlete-monitoring data into immediate training decisions. Through seven semi-structured interviews with elite S & C coaches across NCAA Division I, professional, and Olympic contexts, we identify four recurring breakdowns in their daily data work: fragmented vendor ecosystems, metric overload, scale and staffing constraints and staff turnover. Static mockup elicitation during interviews revealed a consistent preference for simple, interpretable interfaces that foreground selected metrics and concise explanations over dense data displays. We position elite S&C coaches as a distinct user group whose needs are poorly served by current systems, and propose four design priorities: integration stability, selective metrics with contextual explanation, scale-aware views, and governance continuity, to guide future coach-facing sports-science interface design.