Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 24, 2016

New Balance Football travel to Liverpool FC to pick the brains of the legendary Jürgen Klopp. Before they meet the big man, hang out with academy graduate, Joe Maguire, and get put through their paces in some pressing drills with first team players, Lallana, Clyne, and Ings. [video, 3:20]

… Kenya’s Great Rift Valley is an enormous and sparsely developed mountain region with active volcanoes, lush forests, temperate weather and plenty of elevation change. Iten is considered the epicenter of distance running in Kenya, but the sport now permeates the entire region.

“Iten is kind of a mythical place in Kenya and you think of mystical clouds and wizards, but it’s just this quaint little town,” said Kennedy, whose company is making Kenya’s first running shoes. “But it’s home to world-class runners. It’s fun to tell the story of a town of 40,000 people that has so many world-class athletes. You sit down to have dinner and the fastest marathoner from x-y-z is right there.”

… In the 10 NFL drafts before [Harry] Hiestand arrived in South Bend, only one offensive lineman—center Jeff Faine (1999-03)—was selected with one of the first 160 picks. In the last three drafts, four Irish linemen were taken inside the top 90 spots, including two first-rounders. Both the current left tackle McGlinchey and left guard Nelson are likely to join the growing list sooner than later.

Hiestand’s former colleagues and players say his fixation on perfecting details many coaches brush over is central to his success. And it’s one reason why NFL coaches are so intrigued by Irish offensive linemen.

“When you get his guys, they’re ready-made guys,” Carolina Panthers running game coordinator John Matsko says. “You can already see it. Pro football. They’re ready-made so you want to get these guys, and they’re versatile. I mean, this kid Nick Martin, he’s a center/guard. This kid (Ronnie) Stanley, he can play left tackle. He can play right tackle. The kid (Zack Martin) that’s playing right guard, he was a left tackle and he’s playing right guard for Dallas.

Routine. Ugh, right? Nobody ever said: “So excited to be shocked awake by a relentless shrill signal, force down some oat sludge, and stare at a screen every day for the rest of my life.”

But not so fast. In recent years, there’s been a quiet swelling of interest in what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once called “the dull routine of existence.” Researchers have found that routine can have far-reaching psychological benefits, including alleviating bipolar disorder, ADHD, and insomnia. Here’s the lowdown on some other ways a routine might benefit you.

In the aftermath of every Olympics, a critical gaze is fixed on English football and the question asked why our players can’t match the standards of our medal heroes.

Everton took the radical step of appointing one of the chief architects of Team USA’s success to decode the winning formula.

Eight months ago, Iowa-born Dr Peter Vint was finalising his country’s preparations for Rio. As the United States Olympic Committee’s Senior Direct

A digital countdown from the West Shaw Lane walk sign ticks away on Michigan State’s dark campus.

That’s when you learn it is 4:13 a.m. on Aug. 3, and the Spartans are preparing to file into the Duffy Daugherty Football Building for one of strength and conditioning coach Ken Mannie’s legendary preseason conditioning tests.

“The ‘Earn the Jersey’ mentality goes for everything we do around here,” says Mannie, the first voice you hear as cameras pan across MSU’s empty weight room. “Every single day that you’re here, we expect you to have that mentality. You want more reps in practice? Earn it. You want playing time? Earn in it. Every day. I feel that anybody that has that attitude cannot help but be successful.”

Cut to sunrise over Spartan Stadium. It’s as if coach Mark Dantonio is actually directing the Big Ten Network’s “Green and White Days: Inside Michigan State Training Camp.”

The club believes in the “key principles of a hackathon”, according to Diego Gigliani, senior vice president of media and innovation for City Football Group, who is behind the club’s efforts to put it best foot forward for City in the technology space. Those efforts were on show at the start of the month when it launched a hackathon, the club claimed is the first of its kind in the Premier League. Over 60 start-ups flocked to the event, where they were asked to combine data from OptaPro and data visualiser ChyronHego to develop new ideas that could enhance movement, passing, running and pressure on the pitch.

The Drum caught up with Gigliani and Edward Sulley, head of research and innovation at City Football Services to discuss how and why a football club puts on a hackathon as well as the role it could play in its wider business plan.

Microsoft gave the first peek inside the custom vision processor it designed for its HoloLens augmented reality headset. The chip handles a trillion pixel-operations/second in a power budget lower than the 4W Intel Atom-based Cherry Trail SoC that acts as its host processor.

The HoloLens processing unit (HPU) fuses input from five cameras, a depth sensor and motion sensor, compacting and sending it to the Intel SoC. It also recognizes gestures and maps environments including multiple rooms.

Everyoneh and their dog seems to be offering some sort of panacea to manage concussions and diagnose or treat head injuries.

But in clearing two first-of-its kind products on Monday, the Food and Drug Administration was very careful in highlighting what they do not do: diagnose concussions.

The Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing (ImPACT) and ImPACT Pediatric are the first medical devices that are computerized cognitive tests that assess an injured person’s cognitive skills such as word memory, reaction time and word recognition. All these could well be affected after a head injury.

What the agency seeks to do instead is to add novel weapons to the physician’s arsenal in properly evaluating a patient who has been hurt.

The frequency of acute illness in elite level athletes during international competition has been studied in a variety of settings including the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, Winter Youth Olympic Games, Summer and Winter Paralympic Games, and other international athletic and aquatic sport competitions (Table 1). These data indicate that in major international games lasting 9-18 days, 6-17% of registered athletes are likely to suffer an illness episode.

Boosters have billed it as the cheek swab that could save football: an easy genetic test that promises to identify which young athletes are likely to suffer the most severe consequences from a concussion. The idea is to nudge those kids away from contact sports, while giving their less susceptible peers the green light to hit the gridiron.

“Isn’t it just better to know than to not know?” one gene testing company asked in a Facebook ad. Another urged: “Learn the risks. Make confident choices.”

The hitch? The market for this test, touted just a few years ago as revolutionary, seems to be remarkably soft.

Background>

Laboratory-based studies on neuromuscular control after concussion and epidemiological studies suggest that concussion may increase the risk of subsequent musculoskeletal injury.
Objective

The purpose of this study was to determine if athletes have an increased risk of lower extremity musculoskeletal injury after return to play from a concussion.
Methods

Injury data were collected from 2006 to 2013 for men’s football and for women’s basketball, soccer and lacrosse at a National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I university. Ninety cases of in-season concussion in 73 athletes (52 male, 21 female) with return to play at least 30 days prior to the end of the season were identified. A period of up to 90 days of in-season competition following return to play was reviewed for time-loss injury. The same period was studied in up to two control athletes who had no concussion within the prior year and were matched for sport, starting status and position.
Results

Lower extremity musculoskeletal injuries occurred at a higher rate in the concussed athletes (45/90 or 50 %) than in the non-concussed athletes (30/148 or 20 %; P < 0.01). The odds of sustaining a musculoskeletal injury were 3.39 times higher in the concussed athletes (95 % confidence interval 1.90–6.05; P < 0.01). Overall, the number of days lost because of injury was similar between concussed and non-concussed athletes (median 9 versus 15; P = 0.41).
Conclusions

The results of this study demonstrate a relationship between concussion and an increased risk of lower extremity musculoskeletal injury after return to play, and may have implications for current medical practice standards regarding evaluation and management of concussion injuries.

… There are two primary reasons for this pre-eminence.

The United States is one of the few countries to embed sports within the public education system. And equal access to sports for women comes with legal protections, gained with the education amendment known as Title IX in 1972 and the Olympic and Amateur Sports Act in 1978.

About one of every two American girls participates in sports in high school. Of the 213 American medalists in individual and team sports in Rio, according to the U.S.O.C., nearly 85 percent participated in university-funded sports.

“Those things don’t exist elsewhere in the world,” said Donna Lopiano, a former executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation. “We have the largest base of athletic development. Our women are going to dominate, not only because of their legal rights but because women in other parts of the world are discriminated against.”

With two sessions of competition remaining, the Australian women’s track and field squad could return home without a medal from Rio.

On the surface it may look like a below par campaign, but a closer examination of the results reveals not just a good overall result, but maybe a turning point, particularly for our women’s track and field team.

On the third night of the Summer Games, my kids came bursting in the door of our house in Rio. They had been at a stadium in the outer reaches of the city with their father, to watch the finals in the women’s Olympic Rugby Sevens tournament. “Mom, mom, Canada won a medal, we won, we got the bronze,” my daughter, Lizalou, 6, said all in one squashed-up, breathless sentence. “And I got to see Jen Kish!”

As I settled in to hear the blow-by-blow of the match, I had a moment of silent gratitude. Whatever the legacy of these Olympics turns out to be for Rio, the experience of watching women of all nationalities and sizes achieve extraordinary feats has given my children new ways to think about gender and sports and what it means to be strong.