ILT20 2024: Desert Vipers’ strength and conditioning coach presents team’s fitness regime for upcoming season

Dubai, UAE (Jan 3, 2024) – The Vipers Voices podcast featuring Desert Vipers Strength and Conditioning Coach Darren ‘Daz’ Veness, is now live across all major podcast platforms. The conversation offers some great insights into how a team’s strength and conditioning coach can help players maintain their fitness, in their relatively short time together, at a franchise competition like the ILT20.

A key area of focus for Daz Veness is sprinting, and he reached out to all members of the Desert Vipers squad drafted in to play in season two, asking them to focus on that aspect of their fitness regime. Veness told Vipers Voices he believed it to be a crucial ingredient required to keep the players fit and available for selection.

“As a strength and conditioning coach there are certain things I cannot really do too much about, like finger fractures, or stress fractures with the bowlers,” he said. “There is only so much short-term impact you can have as an S and C coach.

“But when it comes to soft tissue injuries, even though we (team) are only together for a relatively short period of time, there is a huge amount of work that can be done, and it is definitely one of my KPIs (key performance indicators).

“Based on that, if we look at the worldwide cricket injury statistics, it is pretty similar to most sports with regards to hamstring injuries; they are incredibly common and can be problematic to recover from, and the problem is once you have had one, you are at an elevated risk of having another one.

“So, any chance we have to make the hamstring more robust and more resilient to a very packed schedule becomes a big deal. And one of the biggest risks to the hamstring is doing some sprinting all of a sudden. So, if you are not acclimatised to sprinting and you do some sprinting, you are at a higher risk. So, it is ideal prep’ if the lads begin some gradual sprinting.

“If we can continue to develop these players where we reduce the severity or actual incidents of soft tissue injuries, then what we are doing is creating more and more opportunities for them to be more resilient and more robust and be available for selection more and more.

“From a Vipers perspective it means that the Director of Cricket and Head Coach, Tom Moody and James Foster, can sit down and select the team that they want to select. They have put a squad together and the point of that is they can choose the team they want to choose rather than the team they have to choose (due to injuries making some players unavailable).”

The second edition of the ILT20 gets underway on Friday 19 January and the Desert Vipers’ first match is against the Abu Dhabi Knight Riders at the Dubai International Stadium on Sunday 21 January.