LSU athletics has an edge over all its opponents. His name is Jack Marucci.
Marucci organized the training of all 21 of the institution’s Division I sports during his quarter-century stint as the head of LSU’s athletic training department, bringing 20 national championships home to Baton Rouge, including three national and five SEC championships for football.
In 2021, Marucci was offered a position as the director of performance innovation on LSU’s sports science team after 25 years as the organization’s head athletic trainer. It was a life-changing opportunity that he couldn’t deny. The role became the first of its kind.
“Jack has always had a knack for innovation, and this new position will allow for his ground-breaking ideas to be taken advantage of by our student-athletes across all sports,” LSU athletics director Scott Woodward said in a statement.
The technology and techniques that Marucci brought to LSU have placed him among the likes of some of history’s greatest inventors. He’s created simulation trainings that helped Jayden Daniels win a Heisman, placed chips in footballs that allows LSU to track the velocity of passes and punts and implemented a slew of player health innovations.
But what makes him unique? How did Marucci pioneer a position that had never been seen before?
The answer becomes more and more apparent the more you talk to him.
“I’m always curious about things,” Marucci said. “When I was a kid, I always took things apart.”
Marucci grew up in Uniontown, a quaint, picturesque coal-mining town in southwest Pennsylvania in the ‘70s.
“Culturally, it’s a lot like Louisiana, where athletics, high school football and any of those types of events always brings these communities closer,” Marucci said.
Marucci developed a love for sports at a very young age. At the time, the local Pittsburgh Steelers were at the peak of their infamous Steel Curtain dynasty, in which the black and yellow won four Super Bowls in six years.
“If the Steelers would lose and my mom would have made Sunday dinner, none of us didn’t feel like eating,” Marucci said. “Which is terrible, right? But that’s how you live and die each week.”
The Maruccis built and owned Shadyside Inn in Pittsburgh; it became a family business. But rather than making them take over the inn, the Maruccis encouraged Jack and his siblings to follow their passions and experience what the world has to offer.
Marucci’s passion for athletics combined with his natural curiosity led him to return to his home state for school. At West Virginia, Marucci received his bachelor’s degree in athletic training at one of the most prestigious programs in the country. He attended Alabama for two years of graduate school and interned for the NFL’s Cleveland Browns and Tampa Bay Buccaneers during both.
His first official job came with Florida State. The Seminoles went undefeated in bowl games and lost no more than two games in a season, and the program fell no lower than No. 6 in the AP poll during Marucci’s eight-year tenure. It’s the most significant stretch of winning in the program’s seven-decade existence. It was so impressive that it helped Marucci land a big-time gig in the bayou, which he stays humble about.
“We started having a pretty good reputation at Florida State when you win,” Marucci said. “You know, there’s great people anywhere, but if you get associated with winning, then you’ve got to be the best, which is a false narrative, really.”
LSU appointed Marucci as the head of the university’s athletic training department in the summer of 1996. Marucci was 31 years old, a little over a decade removed from the same chapter of life where the players found themselves.
Longtime LSU athletic director Joe Dean needed someone to come into Baton Rouge and restructure the entire sports medicine division, and Marucci got right to work. He wasn’t just about rebuilding a flagship university’s athletic training department; Marucci was also about innovating and changing how we look at sports medicine.
In 1997, Marucci hired Shelly Mullenix, the first woman in the SEC to work in a training room. Over a quarter-century later, she’s a senior associate athletic director at LSU.
“She did a great job with the sports psychology,” Marucci said. “Some of these players were used to communicating with females, so there was a need there.”
Marucci’s ability to recognize a need and find a way to satisfy it is similar to that of some of history’s most infamous inventors. As society needed to transmit longer and more complex messages, Alexander Graham Bell patented the first telephone. When the world needed light, Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb.
In 2002, when Marucci’s son, Gino, was eight years old, he fell in love with the colors of Barry Bonds’ custom Canada maple wood baseball bat. Marucci called all the major bat companies with no luck: none made a small enough wooden bat for Gino.
“So I started thinking, ‘Well, maybe I can make one,'” Marucci said.
Marucci made his first wooden baseball bat using the experience he gained from working in his school’s wood shop in junior high.
“It wasn’t very good,” Marucci said. “Made the next one, and it got a little better. So my son used wood bats until, literally, until he’s probably 12 years old.”
Unlike Marucci’s first wooden bat prototype, Gino became a good hitter, and all of his teammates suddenly wanted wooden bats.
“They thought it was unique because no one was using wooden bats back then,” Marucci said. “So he’d say, ‘Oh yeah, go see my dad, he’ll make them for you.'”
That’s the moment Marucci’s bat brigade began. In 2002, Marucci started an LLC, and it continued to grow.
At an athletic training convention in St. Louis, Missouri, Marucci reconnected with Major Leaguer Eduardo Perez, whom he first met when Perez played baseball for the Seminoles.
When Marucci told Perez about his new bat business, Perez insisted that Marucci let him sneak one into an MLB game, even though the league prohibited them.
“I said, ‘Eddie, man, I’ve only seen seven and eight-year-old kids use these things. This might just blow up,'” Marucci said.
With enough convincing from Perez, Marucci gave him one of his bats, and sure enough, the bat stayed perfectly intact upon impact.
“I always tell people, you can get opportunities through relationships and how you treat people throughout your life,” Marucci said. “It’s a circle. Opportunities can create relationships. Relationships can create opportunities.”
Sure enough, Marucci’s connection with Perez had turned his little bat-making hobby into a full-blown business.
“He was like the mouthpiece to start talking to everybody about these baseball bats,” Marucci said. “I was getting phone calls from all these Major League guys, and here I am just cutting these things in the backyard. It was like contraband, [Perez] called it.”
In 2005, Marucci Sports received a license from the MLB to have their bats officially used in Major League games. The company even dethroned Louisville Slugger, the market leader for officially licensed MLB bats for over a century.
Marucci went on to sell Marucci Sports to an investment firm in 2020 before the company sold to Fox Factory for $572 million in 2023. On Jan. 1, 2025, Marucci Sports became the official bat of the MLB, a license that will run to the end of 2028.
However, some of Marucci’s most impressive innovations have come during his tenure in Baton Rouge.
For every LSU football player who comes through the facilities, Marucci and his staff use the S2 Cognition Test, which NFL scouts commonly use to test a player’s perception, processing speed and decision-making skills.
“S2 Cognition is a game changer for understanding how our athletes process action between the lines, and how they’ll instinctually react at full speed,” Florida State football head coach Mike Norvell said via S2. “S2’s technology provides unique insights about our players that allow us to understand how to maximize their abilities as we develop them on their climb to become elite performers on the field.”
Marucci believes he can help the coaches understand how players act on and off the field by understanding how they are wired. But nobody flew off the page as much as Justin Jefferson.
Most people have a dominant eye, which determines whether they perform better on certain routes or when batting baseballs from different angles, but not Jefferson.
“Justin Jefferson was a rarity that could see it from both sides,” Marucci said. “He’s the only player I’ve seen who could change his dominant eye.”
When the Minnesota Vikings first drafted Jefferson in 2020, the coaching staff asked multiple questions about his rare abilities, and he pointed them right to Marucci.
“So right after they drafted him, I said, ‘You guys got the steal of the draft,’” Marucci said. “I just felt that he processes at a very elite level.”
Marucci was right on the money. When Jefferson first arrived in the bayou eight years ago, he only weighed 160 lbs. Since entering the league, Jefferson leads the NFL in receiving yards (7,432) while earning First-Team All-Pro honors twice (2022 and 2024) and Second Team in his first two seasons.
“I never knew I had all that stuff,” Jefferson told Marucci the last time they met.
Since then, LSU became the first flagship university to use eye tracking tests for its football and baseball players, becoming the standard for both in 2018.
Marucci’s job as the Director of Performance Innovation has brought many great ground-breaking discoveries to LSU’s facilities.
He collaborated with Baton Rouge’s very own Dr. Brent Bankston and his techniques to research 20 years worth of ACL repair and recovery, where the group published a study on a procedure with a 92% success rate.
LSU football became the first program to put sensors in the helmets’ of its players thanks to the help of Marucci and Northwestern neurosurgeon Dr. Julian Bells. The two presented their findings on g-force and its impact on college football players at the 2015 NCAA Summit.
Marucci has introduced LSU football to all the latest and greatest sports gadgets and gizmos. The Boudreaux Box, a re-modified refrigerated shipping container that was designed to keep players cool, has become a necessity at training camp due to Louisiana’s sweltering summer heat.
Marucci also brought the “Seeker” to Baton Rouge. Its the first-ever robotic quarterback and punter lobbed into one, allowing Tigers receivers and special teamers to get more work done in a less amount of time without the need of ever throwing or kicking the ball.
“It allows us to be more accurate,” Marucci said. “You could probably get in an extra 30 to 40 percent more reps because its going to be a lot more efficient.”
But how does he do it? How does Marucci constantly look at problems through a different lens from everybody else?
“I think it’s just innate,” Marucci said. “I can’t explain that.”
Marucci looks at a problem or something inconvenient, stops and thinks, “Wait, why are we doing it this way? Shouldn’t there be a better way to do this?”
“I’ve always liked to look at something in practicality,” Marucci said. “Sometimes you do things over time, and you just keep doing them. No one ever looks at it. It’s crazy that some things will just [keep happening] over and over, you keep repeating. I think it’s fun to be around coaches who are forward thinking, and it just makes everybody better.”
Marucci describes forward thinking almost like breaking habits. Once you remove the familiarity factor and view things with an outside perspective, the ability to question the norm and break boundaries becomes a lot more straightforward.
Marucci played a key role in the design of the Broussard Center for Athletic Training at Tiger Stadium and the program’s Football Operations Building. He helped design both facilities with the idea of making it a sanctuary for the players. An open-air design was implemented into most rooms for make it easier for players, coaches and trainers to interact and share moments together. The Football Operations Building even has a pizza oven located in the dining hall at the request of Marucci.
“That was fun to do those different designs,” Marucci said.
Marucci calls back to a conversation he once had with Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre following his retirement in 2010. Favre told Marucci how much he loved football, but how much he missed going in the training and equipment rooms and bonding with the people in them.
“It was all those relationships you had every day,” Marucci said. “It was something that was hard to let go.”
Without even realizing it, these places that Marucci had designed and overseen for decades had become a home away from home for the players who roam through them every day.
“We were kind of like a sanctuary down there; we weren’t their coach,” Marucci said. “So we saw a lot, and we could tell you the temperature of how things were going with the team, and a lot of the head coaches would lean on us for that information.”
That comfortability and community is whats had Marucci coming back for decades.
His compassion for the players blended with his incessant itch to innovate have consistently aided Marucci in his life mission to push the envelope of sports science.
