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The Basketball Podcast: EP410 with Clayton Thompson on Integrating Science, Skill, and Human Connection
In this week’s basketball coaching conversation, Coordinator of Integrated Performance for the Los Angeles Dodgers Clayton Thompson joins the Basketball Podcast to share insights on integrating science, skill, and human connection.
Clayton Thompson serves as the Coordinator of Integrated Performance for the Los Angeles Dodgers, where he sits at the cutting edge of professional sports science and player development. With a background as an R&D Engineer and a Master’s in Business Administration, Thompson is a vocal advocate for dismantling the traditional silos between “strength and conditioning” and “on-field skill.” His philosophy is built on the belief that human movement should be treated as a unified system, rejecting the narrow label of “Strength Coach” in favor of a model that integrates biomechanical data, force-plate analytics, and technical skill acquisition.
Before joining the Dodgers, Thompson refined his data-driven approach at Driveline Baseball, the industry leader in data-informed performance training. His career also includes pivotal roles at TCU (Texas Christian University) and Sanford Health, where he bridged the gap between collegiate athletics and clinical sports science. By applying engineering principles to the kinetic chain, Thompson has become an expert in optimizing rotational power and deceleration—concepts that are as vital for a pitcher’s delivery as they are for a basketball player’s jump shot or step-back.
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Clayton Thompson Quotes:
“[A coordinator of integrated performance] is coordinating throwing and lifting and warmups and all types of exercises and ensuring overall athletic development . . It’s not living in the world of silos. It’s not living in the world of strength coach. It’s not living in the world of pitching coach. It’s being someone who is worried about holistic player development.”
“I started my own training company, and then I was a strength conditioning guy for a long time. But I think that learning the theory of human movement — here’s how people respond, here’s how people learn — sets you up really well to go into these skill coaching positions.”
“I think the overarching point is that you should be a performance coach. You should be someone that works with players on and off the field, learning skill and in the weight room. It’s not just a one stop . . I need to understand why you move the way that you do and understand where the weak link is, for lack of a better term. And it’s not always going to occur on the field. You’re going to see something in the warmup, you’re going to see something in the weight room that’s going to connect a lot of the dots for you.”
“It’s not always a one fix thing and then everything else gets better. You’re creating a more clear and holistic view of the player while you work with them.”
“There are significantly stable attractors that you want people to realize in order to create efficient movement. There are absolutely things that you should do or get close to doing. I assume one of these in basketball is where you should be releasing, not on the opposite side of your head.”
“Whenever someone has their best rep of the session, I always pause it and I ask them to vocalize exactly what just happened. And I then I ask them to go home at the end of the day and write down that rep and write down how it felt.”
“Having something that can track and can give immediate feedback. That’s going to tell you a lot more than, ‘How did that feel?’”
“Time and time again, elite athletes have shown to be more adaptable early and less adaptable late. Same thing in shooting. Depending on the type of pass that comes in, very adaptable at the beginning. But every single time, Steph Curry doesn’t release the ball the same. You can’t do it the same. But compensation around release has to be ridiculously tight. It has to be pretty much within 1 to 2 degrees of whatever every single time. It might not be perfect, don’t necessarily know if that’s a thing in basketball, probably not. But t’s going to be close . . He’s creating compensations for earlier movement in order to create this perfect position right at the end. So he’s taking in a lot of internal variability and then creating stability at one really important place in time.”
“Jumping higher is good, running faster is good. if you can do those things, you’re going to have the capacity for more efficient action, different actions, which I think is huge because you’re opening up different states of coordination.”
“The first thing I always do when working with youth athletes is I turn it into a game. Whatever is going on is always going to be a game right away to get them more involved. However, there is something with youth athletes where they are growing so quickly and every day is a new day for these kids . . it’s a very nonlinear process . . If I were to run a youth baseball team, I would make sure that we did the fundamentals really well, I would make sure that there’s some form of game, some form of variability creating.”
“There is some merit to going, ‘Here’s how you shoot a ball. Your hand should be behind.’ You don’t want them to self-organize into hands on the side. We know that hand behind, shooting with one hand like that is going to be important, especially later. You do not want them to self-organize into something that is less optimal. However, you also want to promote variability within that.”
“That’s one of my favorite ways to be working with a player is altering initial conditions. We can talk about differential learning or we could talk about dynamic systems theory where altering the initial conditions impacts the resulting movement. And it’s the lowest, easiest tier of motor learning. But it works so well.”
“In small-sided games, a different guy starts with the ball every time. In games, especially youth games, having a rotation of who brings the ball up. So, just having an established order, it’s you, then it’s you, then it’s you, then it’s you, then it’s you. With the five guys on the court . . doing stuff like that in youth development, you have to be paying attention.”
Clayton Thompson Breakdown:
Clayton Thompson Selected Links from the Podcast:
Clayton Thompson
Adam Bloebaum
Nikolai Bernstein
The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills
Brice Crider
Rob Hill
Dave Love
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn
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