LeBron James and Nike open the doors today to a new high tech lab, a facility that intends to bring elite sports science to athletes of every gender, of every age and at every level.Nike
A few years ago, a Nike-affiliated NBA player made one of his periodic visits to the Nike world headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. While meeting with Nike’s sport science team, he acknowledged his own personal take on load management -- although he played “fast" all season, he saved “quick” for the playoffs.
As Matthew Nurse, VP of the Nike Sport Research Lab, tells this story, the idea piqued a thought: “If your choice is to be quick all the time, let's give you that ability to be quick. Why would you save yourself if you don’t need to? Obviously, if you need to, that's different, and then let's solve that.”
The wear and tear of speed is as much as the body’s braking—its deceleration—as it is the agile burst. So the Nike team worked with that athlete on footwear, emphasizing appropriate traction and cushioning to go along with a proper fitness regimen.
“We move in three dimensions so the challenge for us is how do we provide that containment and cushioning in more planes?” Nurse says. “At least his initial feedback was very positive. And I don't want to give away who it is, but I'd say there was a great playoff run last year.”
Nurse shares this story in conversation over Zoom while sitting on a futsal-sized turf field inside Nike’s new LeBron James Innovation Center, which formally opens today. A 100-meter sprint track lines one wall. A 200-meter running loop for fatigue monitoring rings the pitch. A more than 500-foot ramp, at a 15.63% grade, adorns the perimeter for incline training. Behind Nurse is “the most advanced basketball court on the planet,” as he puts it. The rafters contain the world’s largest motion-capture installation with roughly 400 Vicon cameras. Underfoot are 97 force plates in the facility. There are several 360-degree 3D body scanners.
"Some of the tools we have, other facilities may have, but nobody else has the ability to build and apply the knowledge in the way that we do,” Nurse says.
More than the hardware in the building—which, at 750,000 square feet, is five times the size of its previous home—Nike’s real I.P., Nurse says, is its 75-person sport research lab, of which 25 have Ph.D.’s and another 40 have a master’s degree in their field.
“We look at sciences as our tool, our weapon, to objectively understand athletes,” he says. “And it's the best truth we have today because we want to deliver measurably better and palpably better products and experiences to the athletes we serve.”
That’s the lesson of the anecdote about the unnamed NBA player. Nike has the sport science technology and knowhow to provide applicable insights in training philosophy and product, but the company’s ambition is to extend that expertise to everyone –NBA player or not. Nike has long used the term “athlete” inclusively to signify everyone with a body.
“Our ability to turn and learn, iterate and build, new and novel solutions for athletes has never been so great,” Nurse says. “And then, lastly, we hope this is a beacon of inspiration for athletes of all abilities to come. We had LeBron in here last week, and he called it his ‘sanctuary.’ And while that's amazing, we want everybody to feel that and, regardless of your skill or where you are in your life's journey, this should be your sanctuary.”
Non-elite athletes are welcome to book appointments and receive the same in-depth physical evaluations, and they do account for about 85% of assessment each year.
The building itself is a sustainability marvel. The 908 solar panels decorated the roof supply about 10% of its power, with the other 90% also derived from renewable energy sources. More than 10 tons of Nike Grind—post-consumer products, manufacturing scrap and the like—were used in the flooring. This is an example of the social good Nike says it wants to achieve, the same way James, the building’s namesake, has been active in his communities.
“If you look at his approaches to how he prepares, how he trains, how he gets ready for either him as a person, him as an athlete or in as a basketball player, he's always looking for new methods and new innovations and pushing the paradigm of what's been accepted,” Nurse says of Innovation Center’s titular star. “So there's a lot of parallels between how he approaches his daily life, and how we all want excellence. We don't settle for the status quo, and we all want to be better.”)
