ESPN ran a set of feature articles on the art of talent evaluation in the College Basketball vertical, with a long piece by Eamonn Brennan anchoring the set. Brennan’s article goes past the art and looks for the science in the talent assessment process. What Brennan found is that more information is not necessarily leading […]
Read More →Archive for August, 2014
Team Culture Economics
The home stretch of college football pre-season and all that is left to discuss for heavyweight programs is team culture and chemistry. At Alabama, chemistry is better than it was the end of last season. The reasons are vague, according to a Montgomery newspaper report: less complaining, more leadership, players making an effort to know […]
Read More →Last Week in Applied Sports Science, 8/17-8/23
The upcoming World Cup schedule for USA Basketball in Spain is severe. Five preliminary round games will take place in six days, including a short rest, early-after-late game on September 4 against Ukraine. If the U.S. needs to improve player fitness in the time leading up to the games that count, that stress will be […]
Read More →APIs and what they mean for sports science
Moneyball, in all its forms of data analysis and in all the different sports, is, I believe, a subset of Applied Sports Science. My feeling is that context matters, and every game or season statistic is attached to a player, a player who also happens to be a hard working human being with psychological and social makeup […]
Read More →A better USMNT might depend on CMNT
Since the World Cup a lot of the conversation about USA national soccer has been about the future of the Men’s National Team, and about player development. Summarizing the discussion takes three words: Be like Germany. Grantland and Noah Davis bring the latest, possibly the smartest, essay on USMNT’s future. It’s smart because it makes a point that […]
Read More →Last Week in Applied Sports Science, 8/10-8/16
Even if the Philadelphia Eagles don’t do anything this season the team’s coach, Chip Kelly, has owned the preseason. A steady stream of profiles documented his sports science approach to American football over the past few weeks (Grantland, Philadelphia Inquirer, ESPN The Magazine, CoachingSearch blog, The MMQB). There was also a useful essay by Kenneth […]
Read More →The Right Amount of Science in Sports Science
All of the converging disciplines in sports science, and so many of them are technical and/or data-heavy, they make it easy to lean heavily on the science part of sports science. Science is a useful, effective model for doing things that haven’t been done before. Scientists make progress using the scientific method (hypothesis, experiment, results, […]
Read More →Last Week in Applied Sports Science, 8/3-8/9
NFL, Premier League and College Football are almost here. Skill, luck and sports science will all play roles as teams win, lose and separate into contenders and non-contenders. Columbia University professor and Credit Suisse managing director Michael Mauboussin has been speaking about his book The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck and often bringing up sports in the process. During his […]
Read More →Integrating the Parts of Sports Science
Sports science is interdisciplinary, applied research. Advances come at the intersection between disciplines, just like so much of the progress in the rest of science and technology. An advance like athlete tracking depends on advances in wireless sensor technologies, in data capture and analysis, in exercise science and in coaching strategy before it can gain […]
Read More →Last Week in Applied Sports Science, 7/27-8/2
If a core principle exists for Sports Science it is that the things which prepare an athlete for peak performance will also reduce the athlete’s risk for injury. But no matter how well prepared an athlete is, the forces of bad luck will sometimes surface and injuries do occur. And then sometimes negligence and stupidity will conspire […]
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