Team USNBA
To become the best, you need to work with the best. All of our trainers are certified experts, and bring experience and skills to help you reach your top performance. When joining USNBA, you will work with the top coaches whose only goal is to help you reach yours!
Sydney Johnson
Founder & Head Coach
Sydney Johnson has spent over 25 years in college and professional basketball. Most recently, he served as the associate head men's coach at the United States Air Force Academy alongside Joe Scott, a former assistant coach at Princeton University during Johnson’s student-athlete career. Before Air Force, Johnson was one of the most successful coaches in school history as the head coach at Fairfield University. Johnson achieved several milestones during his eight seasons at Fairfield, including tying the most winning seasons in school history (five), most postseason appearances in school history (four) and most 19-plus win seasons of any coach in school history (three). In addition, Johnson became the first coach in 40 years to garner four winning seasons in conference play and earned the first win versus an ACC team in school history (12/21/16 vs Boston College).
Johnson’s head coaching career began in the spring of 2007 at his alma mater, Princeton University. After a 6-23 season in his initial year and a 13–14 record in 2008-09, Johnson led Princeton to its first 20-win season since 2004 when the team finished the year with a 22-9 overall record. The following season, the Tigers tied the second-highest win total in Princeton history with a 25-7 mark, won the Ivy League championship and faced off against Kentucky in the first round of the 2011 NCAA Tournament. In all 12 of his seasons as a head coach, Johnson has placed a player on the league's all-conference team or had a player earn an all-conference individual award. All told, Johnson has recruited and coached the #2 and #3 all-time scorers at Princeton and the #1, #3, and #4 all-time scorers at Fairfield.
As a student-athlete, Johnson was the first & only 3-time captain in the history of Princeton University men's basketball and earned Ivy League Player of the Year honors in his senior season. His teams won the Ivy League championship twice and earned the conference’s automatic berth for the 1996 and 1997 NCAA Tournaments, respectively. After a seven year professional career in Europe, he returned to the United States in 2004 and began his coaching career as an assistant coach at Georgetown University. Today, Johnson’s full-time love of the game has him focused on delivering the optimal methods for youth skill development in the Connecticut area. Additionally, he works as a college basketball TV analyst on the USA Network, co-hosts a weekly podcast entitled THE Ivy League Hoops Hour and reserves time for the occasional movie & game night with his family.
Tyler Gaffaney
Instructor
Tyler Gaffaney is an Assistant Coach with the Cal State East Bay Men’s Basketball team and completed his second season on the Pioneers coaching staff in 2021-2022.
Before arriving at Cal State East Bay, Tyler was an Assistant Coach at Wesleyan University in CT. Prior to coaching, he played professional basketball for two years in Spain. In his rookie season, in Zaragoza, he led the Liga Leb Plata in three-point field goal percentage (48.4%). His second season was played in Moron de La Frontera. For his career, he averaged 12 points per game while shooting 50% on two-point field goals and 42% from three-point range.
Prior to playing professionally, Tyler attended Claremont McKenna College where he earned a dual undergraduate degree in psychology and economics and an MBA and played in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC). He was named First Team All-Conference three times and won two conference Player of the Year Awards. He was All-Western District twice, Western District Player of the Year once and All-American once. He earned SCIAC and Western District All-Academic Team honors twice, and was an Academic All-American once. In his final season, he ranked 10th in the nation in points per game (22.5) and fourth in total points (652). Gaffaney was a four-year starter, whose teams won four SCIAC regular season titles and two SCIAC tournament titles, posting an 83-26 record during his four years.
Tyler is a prolific writer, particularly about the mental aspects of basketball, and you can find many of his writings and thoughtful analyses on his blog HoopGains.
Robert Mangino CSCS NSCA-CPT
Strength & Conditioning
Robert is the owner of Mangino Strength & Conditioning, one of the most successful athlete performance and sports training facilities in CT. Rob has worked in the strength and conditioning field for over 20 years, training hundreds of athletes along the way. Many of these athletes have gone on to become varsity performers and captains of various sports, with hundreds going further to all-conference, all-state, and distinguished All-American selections.
317 of his athletes have performed at the NCAA level
20 of his athletes have made it to the professional level
The strength and conditioning program deliver a comprehensive physical development experience, helping USNBA players develop and improve their athletic performance.
Dr. Bryce McManus
Sports Nutrition, Injury Prevention & Wellness
Bryce McManus is a Board-Certified professional specializing in sports chiropractic medicine and nutrition. Dr. McManus received her BA from Boston College, graduating summa cum laude. She was valedictorian of her class at the University of Bridgeport College of Chiropractic. Dr. McManus also has a Masters degree in Nutrition, with a focus on sports nutrition.
Bryce heads up the athlete wellness program at USNBA to help our players develop effective and healthy exercise and nutritional habits that allows for high athletic performance throughout the year, and in the different sports seasons.
Preventing injury is another area in which Dr. McManus specializes. Children, especially those involved in sports activities, need special attention. A primary cause of injury in young athletes is lack of pre-conditioning for the sport in which they are involved. This is especially true of young women. Because of body alignment, center of gravity, and musculature differences from boys, girls’ joints are prone to injury, especially as they mature. As an athlete herself, Dr. McManus has first-hand experience in the value of a regular program of strengthening exercises, and routine physiotherapy and care in preventing injury.
Peter Olausson, Ph.D.
Head of Science and Technology
Peter Olausson has always had an interest in biology and medicine since he was young. After receiving his masters degree in biochemistry at Gothenburg University, Peter was awarded a scholarship to do his PhD thesis work in psychopharmacology. He quickly developed a passion for behavioral neuroscience wanting to understand how the brain controls our behavior, the neural mechanisms involved and how the brain adapts to experience.
After completing his PhD in 2000, he was recruited to Yale University as a researcher at the Yale Center for Genes and Behavior. He subsequently spent over a decade at Yale researching how our memories, motivation and behavioral control together affect our decision-making, and the integration of cognitive and neural functions to optimize behavior.
While Peter’s time doing academic research was both successful and productive, resulting in close to 40 peer-reviewed publications that have been cited more than 3,000 times, he had entrepreneurial aspirations. In 2013 he eventually decided to leverage his scientific research experience outside academia and became a full-time entrepreneur, building a framework for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that won the Lockheed Martin Innovation Challenge in 2018. His work was further noted by Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs. Peter is also a former elite athlete, and represented his native country of Sweden on the national team between 1991-2000 competing in International Competitions and the World Championships. He is currently heading up the science and technology programs at USNBA, using the latest research, technology and AI to help our athletes succeed.