It doesn’t look like much from the street but in downtown Santa Barbara in an nearly unmarked building is one of the premier sports facilities in the world serving and training some of the most elite athletes in the NBA and in all of pro sports.
Behind the walls of the Peak Performance Project (P3), is the advanced sports science technology to assess and train professional athletes founded by Dr. Marcus Elliott in 2006.
“I knew that there was going to be value in taking better care of these athletes," Elliott said. "I just figured if I stayed on this path and were able to execute on that, the world would reward us in one way or another.”
Thanks to their proven track record of injury prevention and individualized training, P3 is widely seen as the go-to off-season training destination for many of the NBA's biggest stars and for other professional athletes worldwide.
Elliott and his team have now been at it for 17 years, collecting data from thousands of athletes helping improve knowledge on injury prevention and the physical well-being of these athletes.
“Every year, the data insights are more and more compelling," Elliott explained. We collect hundreds of data points on how these guys move, how they land, how they cut and we've got over a thousand of them. Our world is is getting insight from all this data and helping teams and leagues be better about how they decrease risk of injury and also optimize athletes.”
Through the use of 3-D motion capture and force plate technology, the bio-mechanic research for each athlete is recorded and used to help determine what needs improvement.
Though it's a hub for current NBA players, many of the prospects taken in the 2023 NBA Draft came through P3 to prepare for the combine and ready themselves ahead of their careers. For Elliott, it’s one of the best perks of the job.
“Every season for us is interesting,with different pro athletes coming in for different sports but I think this is my favorite time of the year.”
It's a point of pride to see a kid entrust their bodies to Elliott and his team knowing that their bodies and athleticism are the key to making it to the NBA.
“They hand over the keys to us for the next two months," Elliott explained of the pre-draft workout process. In his own words, the prospects are saying "P3, you got us.”
For this year’s NBA draft class, Elliott believes it’s a special one but not because of just their abilities on the court, but because of the personalities of many of the up and coming stars within the league.
“This year's class, besides being a bunch of really good athletes, they're just a really bunch of interesting characters.”
Elliott went on to share an anecdote of Kansas standout Gradey Dick, who went 13th overall to the Toronto Raptors, describing his carefree nature doing jumps into the ocean ahead of the NBA Draft Combine.
P3 worked with the likes of the Amen and Ausar Thompson, who went 4th and 5th overall, Jarace Walker, Scoot Henderson, Cam Whitmore and Leonard Miller, all of whom were picked in the first or second round of the draft.
P3 most notably has recently worked with the likes of Luka Doncic, James Harden and Giannis Antetokounmpo but has also worked with other major pro athletes like the New York Mets Jeff McNeil and former Kansas City Chiefs safey Eric Berry.
As of 2018, P3 has a second location in Atlanta, GA at the Emory Sports Medicine Complex. They plan to continue expanding into more sports properties and in the future be able to have younger generations have access to the tools that P3 implements to improve their athletes.
