Nick Potter, Duke’s Assistant Director of Athletic Rehab, works with our team daily and travels on the road, ensuring our players have optimal joint function and muscle activity. He enjoyed a similar role with the U.S. Shooting Team at this summer’s Olympics…
At Duke I am the Assistant Director of Athletic Rehabilitation and my specialty is manual therapy. Jose (Fonseca) and I work together to provide a comprehensive treatment program for all of the guys. If there’s an injury, if they’re tight, if they’re sore, we try to look at them biomechanically by improving joint function, muscle activity, muscle activation. And we make sure they have proper firing patterns in their muscles. So, it helps correct injuries but also prevent injuries if they feel that something is coming on. This year we also started doing biomechanical screening. We take them through a pretty comprehensive screening program. We videotape them and do a video analysis to watch their movements and try to find a correlation between weakness, range of motion limitation, and different comparative movements. Then we use a comprehensive approach of evaluating all of those different elements to prevent injuries from happening in the future and take that to a higher level focusing on performance enhancement.
How did you get involved in this line of work?
Well, I played soccer in college and I had a lot of injuries so I was always in the training room. It came naturally that I got interested in it. I really liked medicine and sports, so I put the two together and found the field of sports medicine. I did sports medicine during my undergrad years and majored in athletic training. I then went to grad school here at Duke and received a doctorate in physical therapy. Then by chance during one of my internships, I met a guy down in Atlanta who invited me to come back. He had a residency in primary care and a manual therapy fellowship. So I went down and did that after I graduated here. That’s where I became skilled more specifically for manual therapy. Then I came back here to do the fellowship in sports and that’s where I was able to apply all of these manual therapy skills with sports.
Talk about manual therapy and the uniqueness of that.
Manual therapy is something that is becoming more popular. It’s more used in physical therapy, but the people who do it are still the vast minority. It takes a lot more physical and mental work. You really have to concentrate on what is going on when biomechanically assessing things.
Explain your role in the Olympics and how you got involved.
Well I’ve been working with USA Shooting for about the last four or five years. I first got into it through the clinic in Atlanta. The guy I was working with was kind of that head person in sports medicine who worked for shooting. So I started out and the first thing was the Olympic trials for the last Olympics. I went on trips all over the globe doing the world competitions, the nationals, training camps, and just doing more and more. I was applying those same manual therapy skills that I use on the basketball guys to the shooters, and it was a good match between their needs physically and their personalities with my skills and personality. Everything meshed pretty well and they asked me to go to the Olympics with them.
What was your most memorable moment over there?
Probably the opening ceremony. As we walked to the stadium there was just this mass of Americans wandering through and all of these people taking pictures and chanting. There was this poster of the American flag in front of us. So you just see this mass of Americans all wearing the same thing with the hats and all that, and you have the American flag and this big stadium that we are all marching to. There were so many similarities with events throughout history that it kind of symbolized. It was just really powerful.
What was your typical day like during Olympic competition?
What was the biggest surprise in Beijing?
You expect it to be a big deal. Working here with Duke Basketball, everything we do is a big deal, every road trip and home game is a big event so you almost become numb to it. But then when you get there and you see the magnitude of it and all of the people from around the world, it took it to another level. It was global.
What events did you see outside of shooting?
I made it to a handball game, which I had never seen before. It was fun to watch. There are all of these sports that you never see during an average day on TV in the U.S. So, it was cool to go to the matches and see all of the athletes. You pick up the rules as you go along. I went to a U.S./Nigeria soccer game. I was supposed to go to one of the basketball games but then a North Korean athlete who finished second or third in one of our events got caught for doping and so our guy ended up getting bronze. We had an awards ceremony the night the U.S. was going to play Spain in basketball.
What impact would doping have in shooting?
The beta-blockers could make you more still and calm and slow your heart rate.
What are your thoughts on China as the Olympic host?
It was quite impressive. Just being able to see the different venues was amazing. Half the people in the U.S. don’t know shooting is in the Olympics, but around the world it is a decent-sized sport. The venue they built there was just phenomenal. It was a huge complex, huge buildings, with a great finals hall. What they did from an infrastructure standpoint was just amazing. The amount of work, money and effort they put in for every sport was incredible. It is not like they just built a new arena for basketball and gymnastics. Everything was first class — fencing, shooting, everything. The thousands and thousands of volunteers, no matter where you went, they all wore these blue shirts and were so friendly. You are at the range and need to move some coolers, and a golf cart comes right there. Overall, they did a great job preparing for it. It was just a ridiculous amount of people supporting it and everyone was very nice, they never told you no.
Where did you stay and how was your living experience?
We were in the Olympic village. It was awesome. One of the things that stood out the most was the night of the opening ceremonies when everyone was putting up their flags. You walk through and it is like a really big college with a bunch of dorms — And all of the dorms were draped in different flags and signs and banners, and everyone had their own flare to it. Australia had a bunch of tables set outside their dorms so it was almost like a café. That was just awesome walking through seeing all of the different countries living the same and doing the same thing. You go to the cafeteria and everyone is eating in there and talking with each other.
Did they built that just for the Olympics?
I am pretty sure it was all brand new and they just built it. When they get done with the Olympics they are going to sell them and people are going to live there.
Did you guys bring home any medals in addition to the bronze you mentioned?
We did. We won two gold, two silver and two bronze.
