University of Georgia Athletics
Women's Basketball
- Title:
- Strength & Conditioning Director
- Email:
- jrucci@sports.uga.edu
Josh Rucci serves as Director of Sports Science for Olympic Sports at the University of Georgia, overseeing sports science initiatives that support student-athlete health, wellness, performance, and availability. He brings approximately 25 years of strength and conditioning experience to the position, including two decades at Georgia and a coaching background that spans nearly every sport in the athletic department.
A central priority for Rucci is helping programs make better use of the data they already collect. His responsibilities span technology integration, data collection, organization and aggregation, analysis, interpretation, and timely reporting. He oversees the development of processes that bring together information from athlete tracking, force-plate testing, strength and movement assessments, and wellness monitoring. His role also includes guiding the use of athlete management systems, coordinating with technology providers, evaluating emerging tools, and helping programs make informed decisions about technology adoption and implementation.
Rucci’s approach places particular emphasis on monitoring external workloads alongside athletes’ internal responses to training, competition, and other stressors. Working collaboratively with sport coaches, strength and conditioning staff, sports medicine personnel, and nutrition staff, he provides objective context to help programs assess training demands, understand athlete responses, and evaluate whether those demands align with intended goals. This work supports planning and preparation, helps identify meaningful changes in readiness, and informs adjustments to training and recovery based on the needs of individual student-athletes and teams.
Rucci currently manages sports science reporting for volleyball, women’s soccer, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball. His work includes screening and performance testing reports, weekly monitoring summaries, game and match analyses, return-to-play data management, and additional projects tailored to each program’s needs. He emphasizes clear communication and timely delivery so that findings can inform staff discussions and decisions within the daily rhythm of training and competition.
Rucci joined Georgia as a strength and conditioning graduate assistant in 2006 and was hired full time in 2010, with responsibilities for women’s basketball, gymnastics, and baseball. His longest coaching assignments were with gymnastics from 2007 through 2021 and women’s basketball from 2008 through 2025. Throughout his tenure, he has worked with student-athletes and staffs across nearly every UGA sport, developing an understanding of the distinct physical demands, training approaches, and competitive environments within collegiate athletics.
In 2021, Rucci moved into a dual role, continuing to oversee strength and conditioning for women’s basketball while beginning the development of an Olympic sports science initiative. That work expanded into performance monitoring, data integration, and reporting across programs, leading to his transition into the dedicated director position in 2026. His experience developing sports science services while continuing to coach informs his emphasis on practical application and collaboration. He approaches athlete monitoring with an understanding of the decisions coaches face and the importance of interpreting data within the context of each sport, team, and individual.
Rucci is completing his Ph.D. in exercise physiology at the University of Georgia. His dissertation focuses on improving the practical use of countermovement jump testing for athlete monitoring. Using force-plate data collected from NCAA Division I female student-athletes during routine training, his research examines how a large number of jump metrics can be organized into a smaller, interpretable framework and how those measures relate to different training exposures across a season. The work has identified an 18-metric framework spanning five components of jump performance, emphasizing the value of examining both performance outcomes and the movement strategies athletes use to achieve them. This research supports the Sports Science department’s approach to metric selection, report development, and interpretation of changes in neuromuscular performance, connecting applied research with the questions staffs encounter in daily practice.
His academic contributions also include teaching and published research. Rucci served as an adjunct professor in UGA’s Department of Kinesiology during the 2022–2023 academic year, teaching therapeutic exercise and program design. He also coauthored a study on feedback and hang power clean execution published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. Through staff education and mentorship of sports science interns, he emphasizes data quality, thoughtful interpretation, and clear communication of findings.
Rucci earned his Bachelor of Science in Education, with an exercise specialist emphasis, from Bowling Green State University in 2005. While at Bowling Green, he interned with the strength and conditioning program, working primarily with football and hockey. He subsequently completed an internship with the Chicago Bulls, working under Al Vermeil, Jeff Macy, and Erik Helland, before joining Georgia. He earned his Master of Arts in motor behavior from UGA in 2008.
In 2024, Rucci received the Master Strength and Conditioning Coach distinction from the Collegiate Strength and Conditioning Coaches Association. He also holds the association’s Strength and Conditioning Coach Certified credential and is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist through the National Strength and Conditioning Association.
Rucci’s interest in athletic performance extends beyond his professional work. He grew up participating in team sports and eventually focused on lacrosse, playing for Bowling Green’s club team during college. After moving to Georgia, his interests expanded to mountain biking, fly fishing, disc golf, and rock climbing. An avid climber for more than 20 years, he continues to apply his strength and conditioning and sports science knowledge to his own training, pursuing challenging climbs into his mid-40s and maintaining a personal connection to preparation, adaptation, and long-term athletic development.
Rucci is married to the former Bridget Berish. They have two children, Everett and Emma Jean.
